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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25840468">When I Paint My Masterpiece</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/GeneralIrritation/pseuds/GeneralIrritation'>GeneralIrritation</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Gotham City Society of Fireproof Women [10]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Multi, The Final Story of Earth 803, for real this time</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:28:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>39,202</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25840468</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/GeneralIrritation/pseuds/GeneralIrritation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Barbara Gordon and Lady Shiva talk about motherhood in the kitchen of a haunted house.</p><p>thegeneralreturns.tumblr.com</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bea Bennett/Dick Grayson, Cullen Row/Jason Todd, Jinny Hex/Harper Row, Stephanie Brown/Cassandra Cain</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Gotham City Society of Fireproof Women [10]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1333402</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>42</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Part One (of Six)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>I<span class="u">.</span><br/>
</em>
  <span class="u">
    <em>And Whatever Walked There, Walked Alone</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>A blue, silky midnight settled on this small <em>comune </em>in Italy, the full moon suffusing the wispy clouds with gorgeous silver.<br/>
<br/>
The things that separated this near-microscopic town of eleven-hundred from the sundry other townships and villages studding the interior countryside numbered only two.</p><p>First?  The church of Saint Nicola and Madonna del Girone, high atop the summit of the cliff around which PIzzoferrato situated itself, whose foundation dated all the way back to the tenth century CE.</p><p>But the second?  The one more germane to this evening’s events?</p><p>That would be the Villa Sammartino.</p><p>It was not the most impressive villa in the nation of Italy.  The main house consisted of three floors situated upon but a single acre.  But many of Pizzoferrato’s residents would emerge from the womb, grow to old age, and die without ever having seen a building bigger than the Villa Sammartino.</p><p>Nor was it the <em>oldest </em>villa in Italy.  It was built at the end of the nineteenth century by the famously corrupt politician Wilbur Devereaux, who raided the pensions of the Fawcett City Fire Department before escaping the United States for various points of Europe, settling in Pizzoferrato under an assumed name.</p><p>But it was a villa whose history could be classified as both violent and odd in equal measure.</p><p>Wilbur Devereaux’s family line extinguished itself fifty years after the final shingle was put on the villa’s roof.  This left various politicians and mobsters of Italy’s Chieti province to wage violent and bloody war upon each other, in hopes of their families claiming the empty, decaying residence.</p><p>But this war, which had been mounted in fits and starts, came to an end fifteen years before the evening during which the events of this narrative take place.</p><p>For the Villa Sammartino had begun to earn a reputation for being haunted.</p><p>It started small at first.  Missing pets from households in Pizzoferrato.  Then the thieves that had taken to roaming the grounds looking for something to steal had begun disappearing as well.  It seemed only the children of the<em> comune, </em>who dared each other to explore the hedge maze just beyond the front gate, managed to escape the sentient wrath of this old and lonely house.</p><p>But some signs of disrepair are fresher than others.  That hedge maze out front?  Something large made its furious way through it, punching large holes through its overgrown green walls.</p><p>And if anyone in Pizzoferrato decided to cast their glance toward Villa Sammartino, they would see something vastly more disturbing still.</p><p>On the first of its three floors, on the lower right hand corner of its stucco walls… a light was visible through the window.</p><p>And this window was the window to the kitchen.</p><p>In the middle of that derelict, dusty kitchen, at a broad wooden table, a woman with red hair sat, while a woman with black hair stood at the sink, running the hot water that still, to this day, flowed through the Villa’s pipes.  They both wore long black leather coats.</p><p>The woman with red hair stuffed a black mask into the interior pocket of her coat, before taking off a pair of black gloves and setting them down on the table in front of her.</p><p>Her name was Barbara Gordon.</p><p>The woman with black hair turned off the water.</p><p>“It will be ready in a moment,” she said in a whiskey soaked voice.</p><p>Barbara said nothing in reply.  She looked down at the body armor beneath her long leather coat, before she stared off into nothing.</p><p>The footfalls of designer boots on ancient floorboards.  The creak of a cheap chair pulled from the table at which Barbara sat.   </p><p>Set before Barbara was a cheap plastic tray, upon which was the contents of an MRE pouch.  <em>“MRE,” </em>of course, stood for <em>“Meal, Ready to Eat.”</em></p><p>A small, pathetic trough of urine-colored applesauce.  The shattered and brittle discs of vanilla wafers.  A tall glass of something dark red and theoretically fruit-flavored.  A large, flat square of pita bread.  And the main course: a small hill of beef goulash, made with boiling water on the kitchen’s still-operational stove, and the color and consistency of cat vomit.</p><p> “The only apology,” the woman with black hair said as she set an identical tray in front of herself, “that I shall ever afford you is that I could not provide you with something better for your last meal on Earth.  Alas, it was all they had in the APC.”</p><p>Now, finally, the woman with black hair sat down, and Barbara Gordon fixed her eyes upon her.</p><p>Even the word <em>“gorgeous” </em>would have been inadequate.  She was of Asian descent, with high cheekbones and infinite black pools for eyes.  Her thin lips were built for analytical frowns, like Al Hirschfeld’s old caricatures of Katherine Hepburn.  Her face made a fool of linear time.  She was either in her mid-twenties or her late fifties, though Barbara knew for a fact that the latter was more accurate.</p><p>Barbara Gordon knew all about her.</p><p>Barbara Gordon had, in fact, acted as a mother figure to the biological daughter of the woman with black hair… For a time, at least.</p><p>The woman with black hair had been born and raised as Sandra Wu-San in Detroit, Michigan.  But in her adulthood, she became known as the deadliest woman on Earth under a sobriquet that struck fear in the hearts of mercs and thugs across the globe entire.</p><p>The woman with black hair tucked a strand of it behind her right ear before she returned Barbara’s stare.</p><p>“So,” Lady Shiva said.  “What brings you to Italy?”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>I<span class="u">I.</span><br/>
</em>
  <span class="u">
    <em>My Strange Adventure</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>BLUDHAVEN - THIRTY-SIX HOURS AGO</b>
</p><p>The city of Bludhaven was strange, in that its suburbs were situated in the middle of the city, as opposed to the outskirts.  Nestled like an egg in the midst of skyscrapers, meth dens, and <em>slightly bigger </em>meth dens, was Avalon Hill.  Several police precincts acted as a line of demarcation between the relative idyll of Avalon Hill and the concrete wilds beyond, where Bludhaven’s rich and dangerous played.</p><p>Yes, Avalon Hill was the only part of Bludhaven that didn’t look like Hell coming up through the concrete.  There, the houses were squat and uniformly one story affairs, as though they were ducking to escape notice.  The one of particular interest this rainy evening is the one with the forest green paint job on the corner of Mulvehill and Doppler.  The one with the two-car garage and the enclosed porch.  </p><p>In the living room of the house on the corner of Mulvehill and Doppler, as a fire roared in the fireplace, Dick Grayson sat on the couch with his right hand on the ballooning midsection of his expectant wife Bea Bennett.  The TV played with the mute button on, its sickly blue light dueling with the yellow richness of the firelight, and losing badly..</p><p>Bea was about five months along.</p><p>“If they’re a girl?” Dick asked.</p><p>Bea reached back behind her head and undid the tie that held her long dreads in place.  They came down around the shoulders of her blue t-shirt (complete with NIghtwing logo) in a black cascade.</p><p>“Janice,” Bea said.  </p><p>Dick frowned a little as he went through his memories.  “Is it named after anyone special that I’m forgetting?”</p><p>“Girl I knew when I went to Spelman,” Bea said.  “I was so thirsty for this one boy in town, I told her I’d name my first born after her if she introduced me.”</p><p>“What was this boy’s name?”</p><p>“I don’t recall.”</p><p>“So this relationship with this college kid didn’t pan out, but you’re gonna name your daughter after the woman who introduced you?”</p><p>Bea smiled, her alert eyes acting as signal beacons within the dark skin of her face.  “I am a lady of my word.”</p><p>Dick leaned in and kissed her on the forehead, never taking his hand away from her belly.</p><p>“And if they’re a boy?” Bea asked.</p><p>Dick ran his free hand through his dark hair before he finally said:</p><p>“Alfred.”</p><p>Bea’s eyes went all squinty.  <em>“Alfred?”</em></p><p>Dick nodded.</p><p>“You’re punishing my son by naming him <em>Alfred?”</em></p><p>“The kindest and most understanding man I have ever known was named Alfred,” Dick said.  “And if just the name was ten percent of that, then our boy is going to be something to be proud of.”</p><p>Bea smiled, bringing her right hand over that of her husband’s resting on her stomach.  “Is this a rich person thing, or a superhero thing?”</p><p>When they started dating, Dick knew that he was going to have to reveal that he was a former Robin and the current Nightwing rather early in the relationship if they were going to have any hope of making it.  The longest and most fulfilling romantic relationships he had ever had were with Barbara Gordon and Princess Koriand’r of Tamaran, both of whom were superheroes, and as such, he didn’t have to keep secrets from them.  </p><p>“Both.”</p><p>“Uh-huh.”</p><p>“And it’s still weird being referred to as<em> ‘a rich person.’”</em></p><p>“You grew up in a mansion.”</p><p>“No,” Dick said.  “I <em>came of age </em>in a mansion.  I <em>grew up </em>in a circus tent.”</p><p>Bea smiled.  “And if you knew a few more bears and prostitutes, you’d have been in a John Irving book.”</p><p>Dick laughed.  A loud barking “HA!”</p><p>Six years ago, Dick had been chaperoning teachers from Saint Afra’s Academy (where Dick himself was employed as a gymnastics instructor) to the bar at which Bea Bennett worked.  They met, they talked, they started dating, they fell in love, they got married.</p><p>What was it about Bea Bennett that she would be the recipient of a proposal from the one and only Dick Grayson, whose romantic life from the time he turned eighteen was the subject of debates, jokes, and even a large betting pool among the members of the Justice League?  What was it that made her special?</p><p>Or was it that Bea Bennett of Bludhaven was the one who was nearest him when he finally changed?  Dick knew that he was the type to bottle his emotions when things were truly bothering him, and that he had learned such behavior from Bruce Wayne, the man who had raised him into a life of costumed vigilantism after the murder of his acrobat parents by Gotham City mobsters.  He also knew he had finally grown up when, upon being asked by Bea just what the hell was wrong with him when he was in one of his moods, he actually<em> told </em>her, which was something he hadn’t done for Babs and Kory.</p><p>It wasn’t their fault.  They just… <em>weren’t around </em>when Dick Grayson completed his metamorphosis into husband and father material.</p><p>Bea ran her hand up and down the sleeve of Dick’s shirt, and brought both her legs to the floor.  She was going to get up.</p><p>“Need help?” Dick asked.</p><p>“I give myself two months before I need help getting off of the couch,” Bea said.  And true to her word, she arose, unaided, with only minimal grunting.</p><p>“You coming upstairs?” Bea asked.</p><p>“I’ll be a few minutes,” said Dick.  “I’m, uh…”</p><p>“You’re what?”</p><p>Dick looked at Bea, smiled, and asked “Would it be weird if I said I was just gonna stare into the fire and think for a few minutes?”</p><p>“Yes,” Bea said.  “Acceptable, but, y’know, still weird.”</p><p>He shrugged.  “I’d just like to sit, and… y’know... <em>reflect </em>on how long it took to get here.  I started in a circus tent, and now I’m gonna play with little Janice-or-Alfred on that floor.  In between, my parents died, I became a superhero, I became <em>another </em>superhero, I’ve fought off three separate apocalypses, and I… uh…”</p><p>
  <em>I died last year.</em>
</p><p>But Dick dared not say it.  It was still a sore spot for Bea.</p><p>Bea got it… But she just nodded.  She didn’t say anything until she said:</p><p>“Gimme your hand.”</p><p>“Why?” Dick asked.</p><p>“Because I can’t bend over very far.  Give me your hand.”</p><p>He held out his right hand to her.  She took it in both of hers, before bending over as much as she could, and putting his hand to her lips.</p><p>“You’re adorable.”</p><p>“And you’re gorgeous,” Bea said before dropping his freshly kissed hand.  “Don’t be too long.”</p><p>“I won’t, honey.”</p><p>Bea padded out into the hall, and Dick’s blue eyes lazily shifted back to the fire.</p><p>
  <em>Janice.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Or Alfred.</em>
</p><p>Dick Grayson’s kid was going to have it made.  Birthdays and Easters and Christmases at Wayne Manor with Grandpa Bruce and Grandma Selina.  And Bruce Wayne, now more than ever in the past year, seemed the grandfatherly type.  He smiled a lot at the age of fifty-two, and laughed a healthy amount as well.  He even, in his own awkward and lightly befuddled way, had taken to cracking the occasional joke, which was something that would have been alarming and alien coming from the Bruce Wayne of even just <em>two </em>years ago.</p><p>But Dick’s mind sauntered lazily to the dark cloud within the silver lining.  Chiefly that any big family get-togethers at Wayne Manor would not, strictly speaking, involve the whole family.</p><p>Last year, Cassandra Wayne (former Cassandra Cain, Orphan, Batgirl, Black Bat, and current adopted daughter and only child of Bruce Wayne) succeeded Bruce as Batman.  She had been the Head Bat in Gotham for six years before that, since Bruce’s retirement, but only in the past year did she start calling herself by the name.  Through a cunning and intelligence both her foes and the rest of the informally-dubbed <em>“Batfamily” </em>thought beyond her, Cassandra defeated Ra’s al Ghul, allowed for the permanent destruction of the League of Assassins, and put the Arkham Knight in a mental health facility here in Bludhaven.</p><p>But it was the method in which Cassandra deceived and enlightened everyone in her orbit that caused friction.  </p><p>Her grand master plan involved the very public death of Dick Grayson himself, and in such a manner that could not be faked, nor could Dick be let in on the plan for fear of giving the whole thing away.  Cassandra had engineered it that Dick was legitimately shot to death by the Arkham Knight.  And though she’d had Cassandra <em>“Wonder Girl” </em>Sandsmark spirit Dick’s body to a Lazarus Pit beneath Gotham City, almost everyone else thought he was dead for the better part of a week.</p><p>Of the people closest to Dick, both Roy Harper and Wally West had, to this day, not forgiven Cassandra Wayne.  But that was nothing compared to the fury and hatred placed upon Cassandra’s name by Bea Bennett.  So righteous was Bea’s anger that she refused to go to Gotham City for fear of even bumping into the town’s new Batman.  She would brook no palaver, no parley, and no detente with Cassandra Wayne.  Some things, to the soul of one Beatrice Bennett, were quite simply unforgivable.  And the death of her husband, however impermanent it may have been, was one such thing.</p><p>And as for how Barbara Gordon reacted to Cassandra’s plotting?  <em>Well…</em></p><p>In all the hurled invective and delayed reconciliation that came in the wake of Cassandra Wayne’s coming out party as Batman, the one person whose opinion on the subject of the death of Dick Grayson was repeatedly overlooked was Dick Grayson himself.</p><p>For his part?  He was cool with it.</p><p>He did the math.  He had only been dead for five hours.  He had, in his life, taken longer naps.</p><p>In the six years prior, Dick had been the Black Sheep of the Gotham City network of superheroes, as he had not taken it well when Bruce tapped Cass as the one to take over after retirement, running afoul of Bruce and Cassandra while permanently ending the long relationship he had had with Barbara Gordon.  Dick Grayson had become the longest-tenured non-powered superhero in the whole world, and he thought his name should have been in the conversation.  But Bruce just said Cass was moving on up.  Dick wouldn’t have taken the job as Batman if offered, but he felt he <em>deserved </em>the offer.  But in light of what Cass had done a year ago, Dick knew that Bruce made the right choice.  Dick knew that had he been Gotham’s Batman, he wouldn’t have been capable of the kind of planning and lateral thinking and pure ruthlessness required to stop Ra’s and the Arkham Knight from destroying the city with no (permanent) casualties.  In the past year, Dick had reintegrated himself with the Gotham network.  He’d hung out with Cass, chaperoned Stephanie Brown as she went bar-hopping, and spent one night looking after the daughter that Tim Drake and Harper Row had.  He’d even had a training session with Carrie Kelley and Aaliyah Ramsay, who were the fourth Robin and third Batgirl respectively.</p><p>Dick let the warmth of the fire lull him into a state of light hypnosis when he heard the bell for the front door ring, followed by Bea yelling <em>“I’ll get it!”</em></p><p>He stayed where he was.  Dick Grayson did not want to get his wife cranky by hovering.</p><p>Dick heard her bare feet on the hardwood floor of the halfway, and the creak of the door opening.  A moment of silence before he heard:</p><p>“Hon?  I’m… <em>ninety-nine </em>percent sure this is for you.”</p><p>Dick got up off the couch.  He straightened his red flannel shirt, put his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and left the living room.</p><p>The hallway to the front door was dim.  The light from the kitchen alcove shed illumination on the framed photos on the wall: Bea’s mom and dad, Dick and Bruce at a charity event last year, Dick and the Saint Afra’s gymnastics team from two years ago, holding their medals when they won state.</p><p>Dick’s stride slowed as he advanced on the front door.  There stood Bea, seemingly miniscule in front of the hulking silhouette belonging to their evening caller.  He did not feel that his wife was in danger, no.  There was something familiar about the silhouette.  Something oddly comforting.</p><p>A flash of lightning from outside, and Dick saw the leather jacket with the metal shoulder pads.  The Dead Kennedys t-shirt.  The bronze metal face with the comically lantern jaw.  The unblinking, glowing red eyes.</p><p><em>“Cliff?” </em>Dick asked, unable to stop the smile from sprinting across his face.</p><p>It was Cliff Steele.  Charter member of the superteam known as <em>“The Doom Patrol,” </em>under the sobriquet Robotman.</p><p>Dick Grayson hadn’t seen Cliff Steele in… <em>Christ, </em>he didn’t even <em>know </em>how long.</p><p>“Heyya, Dick,” Cliff said.  His deep voice came from his unmoving metal mouth in a sonorous, tinny foghorn.</p><p>Bea, for her part, apparently had no idea how to react to any of this.</p><p>“Um… I… Uh…”</p><p>“You don’t need to worry, miss,” Cliff said.  “No one followed me.  No one even knows I’m here.  Whatever secrets you’re keeping, Grayson, they’re still safe.”</p><p>“Thanks,” Dick said.  “Would, uh… Would you like to come in?”</p><p>“I’m hell on hardwood floors,” Cliff said.  “As you can plainly see.  Though if you wouldn’t mind talking out here on the porch a minute?  I’ve come to ask for a favor.”</p><p>“Alright,” said Dick.  Cliff nodded his metal head, and stepped out of the view of the doorway, into the shadows of the porch.</p><p>“Looks like he has a story,” Bea said.</p><p>“I’ll tell you later,” said Dick.  “You heading on up to bed?”</p><p>“Mmm-hmm,” Bea said.  She got up on her tiptoes and briefly kissed him on the lips.</p><p>“I’ll be up soon.”</p><p>“Don’t keep me waiting, Gorgeous.”</p><p>“I’ll try not to,” Dick said.</p><p>Dick watched Bea hang a left and find the hall to the bedroom before he checked the front door to see that it wasn’t locked, and stepped out onto the porch.</p><p>In the darkness, Dick could hear Cliff ever-so-gingerly flit a little to his left to make room.  It had been sixty years since racecar driver Cliff Steele had gotten into the car accident that rendered him a brain in a robot body.  In those interminable decades, Cliff had to get used to the space he took and the impact he made.  He couldn’t make the same kind of steps Dick made on the porch.  Not without destroying it, anyway.</p><p>For a moment, Dick and Cliff just looked out at the rain falling on the front yard in the yellow glow of the street lights, the two kept dry by the glass of the enclosure.  Dick just waited for Cliff to speak.</p><p>“Sorry I bothered you at home,” Cliff said.</p><p>“It’s alright.  How did you get here?  Isn’t Doom Manor in Ohio?”</p><p>“I called in a favor with Cyborg up at the watchtower, and he boom-tubed me here,” Cliff said.  “Something tells me that me and Vic Stone would get along if we hung out more.  Anyway, I only got about twenty minutes before I BT back to Doom Manor automatically.  Larry and Shyleen offered to come with me for moral support, but I said no.”</p><p>Dick knew that Larry meant Larry <em>“Negative Man” </em>Trainor.  And Shyleen was…</p><p>“Shyleen?”</p><p>“Shyleen Lao,” Cliff said.  “Fever.  She’s new.”</p><p>“Ahhh,” Dick said.  “Turnover on the Doom Patrol’s high, right?”</p><p>“Not as high as you’d think,” Cliff said.  “Now it’s me, Negative Man, Element Woman, Coagula, and Fever.”</p><p>Dick smiled.  He remembered Coagula from Bruce and Selina’s wedding sixteen years ago.  Real name Kate Godwin.  Had the power to turn solids into liquids and vice-versa.  And she was notable because she was the only person with whom Harley Quinn would dance at the reception.</p><p>“Used to be,” Cliff said, “when we started out, It was me, Negative Man, Mento, Elastiwoman… and Beast Boy.”</p><p>Dick Grayson felt some color go out of the world.</p><p>Beast Boy, real name Garfield Logan, was a member of one of the Teen Titans groups that Dick had led in the old days, in his first couple of years as Nightwing.  Gar had green hair, green skin, a sense of humor so cheesy that one could make pizza with it, and the ability to transform into almost any animal.</p><p>Sixteen years ago, Beast Boy died during the Battle of Founders Island, protecting the world and the multiverse from the Army of Nemesis.  The Doom Patrol member Elastiwoman (real name Rita Farr) had been a mother figure of sorts to young Garfield.  Once he was gone, the Doom Patrol in specific and superheroism in general just seemed too much to bear.  She left both the group and public life.</p><p>“But the one member of the gang I wanted to talk to you about,” Cliff said, “is Crazy Jane.”</p><p>Dick nodded.  “I’m going to need a refresher on her… Wait, wasn’t she the one with Multiple Personality Disorder?”</p><p>He could hear the creak of Cliff’s neck, and feel the reproach in his voice when he said:</p><p>
  <strong>“Dissociative… Identity… Disorder.”</strong>
</p><p>Cliff must have deeply cherished both his friendship and his memories with this Crazy Jane.  He knew her terminology and would apparently use his voice to wither anyone who got it wrong.  And now Dick Grayson felt like an asshole.</p><p>“She was born Kay Challis,” Cliff said, moving the conversation along.  “Sixty-Four alters, each with their own superpowers.”</p><p>“But she’s not in the Doom Patrol anymore?”</p><p>Cliff sighed and took a moment, before he spoke again.</p><p>“Guy who founded the group?” Cliff asked.  “Smarty-pants named Niles Caulder.  He was… He was a motherfucker, I don’t mind saying.”</p><p>Dick nodded.  If memory served, Niles Caulder was the one who was responsible for Cliff Steele’s car accident (and Larry Trainor’s plane crash, and Rita Farr’s chemical spill, and the circumstances surrounding Garfield Logan’s shape-shifting abilities).  But neither Cliff nor his contemporaries on the Doom Patrol knew that to start.  They called Caulder <em>“The Chief,” </em>and had no idea that he had essentially created a small army of functionally immortal superbeings to pit against the forces of evil by engineering their misfortunes.</p><p>Niles Caulder died twenty years ago under mysterious circumstances.</p><p>“But if you ask me,” Cliff said, “The Chief comes in a solid silver in the motherfuckery Olympics behind one man and one man alone.  And that… is Steve Dayton.”</p><p>“Mento.”</p><p>“The very same,” Cliff said.</p><p>Dick rode a dull wave of surprise.  He recalled Bruce saying that when he was studying business, he had idolized billionaire inventor and industrialist Steve Dayton.  Both for his considerable acumen in science and his fortitude in the boardroom.  That he was also a superhero with psychic powers was just icing.</p><p>Steve <em>“Mento” </em>Dayton died of a brain aneurysm shortly before Garfield Logan joined the Teen Titans.  The money he left behind went into Ohio’s Doom Manor, and funded the Doom Patrol’s activities to this day.</p><p>“How was he on the asshole side?” Dick asked.</p><p>“Yelled at Gar a bunch,” Cliff said.  “Thought he <em>owned </em>Rita.  And his jones to get richer and richer meant he made his little Dayton Devices for some shady people.”</p><p>“How shady?”</p><p>“Try<em> Lex Luthor.”</em></p><p>“Jesus.”</p><p>“I know,” Cliff said.  “We found a manifest for his little gizmos in the basement of the Manor about fifteen years ago.  The only one wasn’t accounted for was one that was made in a lab at this villa in Italy.  We fly out there, but it turns out someone else was looking for it.  Someone… not very nice.”</p><p>“Government or supervillain?”</p><p>“Villain,” Cliff said.  “Sportsmaster.”</p><p>Dick just burst out laughing.</p><p><em>“Sportsmaster” </em>was Larry Crock, an assassin and thug who went out into the field under a sports gimmick.  He was effective, he was brutal, he was genuinely sociopathic… but no matter how good he was at being bad, he just wasn’t going to be taken seriously as some goober in a hockey mask flinging exploding golf balls. </p><p>“Sorry,” Dick said, regaining his composure.  “It’s just… <em>Jesus, </em>I haven’t heard that name in ages.”</p><p>“There’s a reason for that,” Cliff said, and Dick set his eyes on the darkened figure of Robotman until he decided to speak yet again.</p><p>“Sportsmaster already has the Dayton Device on over his hockey mask,” Cliff said.  “It was a prototype that bent light and made it solid.  I don’t know if he was stealing it for himself or if there was a payday attached, but me, Larry, Jane, and Kate?  We were getting our asses handed to us.  But the Dayton Device starts glowing on Sportsmaster’s head.  I’m a robot, you don’t need to tell me what malfunctioning machinery looks like.  But right before it blows, Jane tackles him.  We hear a big boom, the room goes white, and when I look up, Sportsmaster, the Dayton Device, and… and Jane are all gone.  All that’s left is this long black line on the cellar wall of this villa in Italy.”</p><p>Silence after that.  Dick waited a reasonable time, before he said:</p><p>“I’m sorry for your loss, Cliff.”</p><p>“Thanks,” Cliff said.  “It happened fifteen years ago… But the reason I’m here tonight is because <em>three days </em>ago, Crazy Jane’s distress communicator goes off.”</p><p>And that’s what raised the hairs on the back of Dick Grayson’s neck.</p><p>“I see,” he said.</p><p>“Sound like a mystery to you?” Cliff asked.</p><p>“It does.”</p><p>“Think it might be something you want to look into?”</p><p>“Maybe not me personally,” Dick said.  “But, uhh… I might know someone who knows a few someones.”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>III.<br/>
</em>
    <em>Cattle Queen of Montana</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>If Barbara thought that the MRE goulash looked like cat vomit, then she thought it tasted like pulped cardboard with watery tomato sauce applied with a spray bottle from four feet away.</p><p>But she kept eating, slowly, letting the food get colder, but extending her life.</p><p>Lady Shiva seemed to be taking her time as well.  Barbara figured she was either waiting to unleash some conversational tangent, or she thought the goulash blew ass too.</p><p>Who knows?  Maybe it was both?</p><p>“I’ve been across the world numerous times during the decades I’ve been alive,” Shiva said, regarding a wad of goulash stuck on the end of the brown plastic fork that came with the MRE.  “I’ve had bourekas in Casablanca, buuz in Ulaanbaatar, and salade nicoise in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.  But do you know, unquestionably, my favorite mode of cuisine?”</p><p>Barbara didn’t say anything.  She didn’t even blink.</p><p>Shiva put her fork down, and leaned forward, a glint playing in her soulless eyes.</p><p>“The kitschy… fifties… diner.”</p><p>Barbara still didn’t say anything.</p><p>Lady Shiva must have found Barbara Gordon’s stone face suddenly and explosively funny, because she started laughing high and clear.  It made Barbara’s skin crawl.</p><p>She clung to the concept that Lady Shiva was not insane.  She was quite simply the greatest hand-to-hand fighter on Earth.  She made her living as an assassin, and all who had ever contested her had died in horrible agony.  In her free time, she roamed the globe, challenging the greatest martial artists she could find to fights to the death… And Lady Shiva was still alive.</p><p>Lady Shiva just… played by different rules than everyone else.</p><p>“They have to commit to the bit, though,” Shiva said.  “They can’t play any songs past 1963.  The waitress’ name tag has to say<em> ‘Peggy Sue,’ </em>even if it’s not their real name.  They have to have movie posters on the wall, like... like <em>The Bridges at Toko-Ri, </em>or… or… what’s that one Western with Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan?”</p><p>Barbara broke her vow of silence to ask “How… the fuck… would I <em>possibly </em>know that?”</p><p>Shiva apparently did not hear her.  “People seem to be so confused when I tell them.  They see Lady Shiva, the world’s greatest assassin, but deep down, in a place I rarely like to admit exists, I’m still… Sandy from Detroit.”</p><p>That Lady Shiva had a family and a birthplace struck Barbara as uncanny.  As though The Boogeyman had Boogeyparents.</p><p>“But it isn’t the food that does it for me,” Shiva said.  “You can get a cheeseburger anywhere.  What does it for me is the ambiance.  That… That <em>optimism </em>that comes with the fifties, unearned though it may have been.  That lack of complication.  Of course, the fifties in America were complicated if you were a person of color.  Or a woman.  Or anything other than straight.  Oh, and escalating tensions with Russia and the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran.”</p><p>Shiva took that bite of shitty goulash and swallowed politely before she continued.</p><p>“An entire country had on a big dumb smile,” Shiva said.  “It was the last stop before the Kennedy assassination, and America had to march from one difficulty to another, that dumb smile getting smaller… and smaller… and smaller.”</p><p>She set down her fork again, interlaced her fingers, and cracked her knuckles.  They were loud enough that Barbara jumped at the sound.  Shiva set both of her hands flat on the table, on either side of her dinner, and leaned in to fix Barbara with her gaze.</p><p>Behind Shiva, on the wall, something black and oily seemed to ooze from a crack in the creme-colored plaster.  It silently spread, a seeming lesion in reality itself.</p><p>“When I fight someone,” Shiva said, her eyes intent on Barbara, “and I deign to let the fight go on longer than mere seconds, they get that same smile on their faces.  Because they think they’ll be the one who finally defeats Lady Shiva.  The longer the fight goes on, that smile gets smaller and smaller, until it fades into the same panicked grimace.  The wide-eyed and gulping rictus of someone who knows that they are going to die.”</p><p>She took her hands off of the table, and folded her hands in her lap.  “That’s why I like fifties diners.  I like the look of people who don’t know they’re doomed.”</p><p>Shiva saw that Barbara was looking beyond her.  She turned in her chair to see, and saw the black oozing from the crack in the wall.</p><p>Barbara saw that even someone as fearsome and terrifying as Lady Shiva, someone with her considerable body count, still had enough human in her to shudder.</p><p>She turned back to Barbara and grinned with dead eyes.</p><p>“Your friends,” she said.  “Do you think they had those smiles on their faces before the end?  Were they so dumb to think they would see the morning?”</p><p>Barbara Gordon’s insides froze over.  The surreality of eldritch horrors and evil assassins and just… just <em>terrible </em>food had dulled the impact that had now resharpened itself and took up residence between her ribs.</p><p>
  <em>Jinny.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Harper.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And… And Dinah.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Gone.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They’re all gone…</em>
</p><p>“I shouldn’t have asked,” Shiva said.  “I genuinely don’t care about your friends, or you, or your unimpressive little… <em>grief </em>thing you’re doing..  What I <em>do </em>care about… is Cassandra.”</p><p>If anything were going to start a fire, it would be that.  Though whether at herself or at the woman across from her, Barbara Gordon didn’t know.</p><p>Barbara Gordon hadn’t spoken to Cassandra Wayne in about a year.</p><p>“The only reason I have kept you alive,” Lady Shiva said, “is because I want to know about my little girl.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Part Two (of Six)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>IV.</em>
    <em><br/>
</em>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span class="u">AItA?</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <b>THE </b>
  <b><em>AERIE THREE,</em> </b>
  <b>OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN -  FOUR HOURS AGO</b>
</p><p>The funding of the all-female superteam known across the globe as <em>“The Birds of Prey” </em>was not, strictly speaking, legal.</p><p>Barbara Gordon, the former Batgirl and current Oracle, hit upon it at the dawn of her career as the intelligence-gathering  backbone of the superhero community.  In a bit of trivia lost to time (for indeed, not even Miss Gordon herself wishes to speak of it), Oracle did not immediately begin her post-Batgirl, post-paralysis career as the Birds of Prey founder.</p><p>Rather, it was as the information broker for Amanda Waller, the late former ARGUS director head of Task Force X (known colloquially among those with such privileged information as <em>“The Suicide Squad” </em>).  </p><p>One year at her unofficial post at ARGUS, helping The Wall send detained supervillains like Deadshot and King Shark on dangerous and easily disavowable missions on behalf of the United States government, and Barbara had uncovered a wealth of info on every Wall Street embezzler, Quraci arms dealer, Markovian terrorist, and Santa Priscan drug cartel.  </p><p>Most notably, the information on their bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Corto Maltese, and Macau.  If Barbara Gordon wanted to go into business for herself, found her own superhero operation, then she’d have an unlimited supply of capital with which to do so.</p><p>What the fuck were the account holders going to do?  Call the cops?</p><p>The Birds of Prey operation, now in its nineteenth year, had paid for untold millions in equipment and expenses.  Technically, it was more of an espionage outfit than it was a superhero organization, but it had managed to save more lives through its ops than both versions of Batman combined.</p><p>And it paid for the <em>Aerie Three </em>, the advanced stealth aircraft in the cargo bay of which Barbara now sat reading a book of Dashiell Hammett’s <em>Continental Op </em>stories.</p><p>A thought stopped Barbara mid-sentence.</p><p>She had taken the Oracle name and weaseled her way into the ARGUS mainframe to make herself known to Amanda Waller just shy of her twentieth birthday.</p><p>Barbara Gordon turned forty next September.</p><p>
  <em>Jesus...</em>
</p><p>But she was not alone in the cargo bay this evening.  Two members of the Birds of Prey were with her.</p><p>As well as one… provisional member.</p><p>Fellow founding member Dinah Lance-Choi (codename: <em>“Black Canary” </em>) was keeping to herself in the corner of the currently cargo-less cargo bay.  She was in uniform, still rocking the black leather jacket and fishnets into her own forties, laying those sturdy and shapely legs into a black punching bag, the kicks sounding like rifle shots.</p><p>And then…</p><p>Last year, during a vote that Barbara herself was not around for, Harper Row was inducted into the Birds.  When Miss Row had gotten her start as the teenage vigilante Bluebird, she and Barbara had not gotten along.  A few short years later, Barbara was in the waiting room as Harper gave birth to her daughter Matilda-Ann.  Harper had retired from superheroism to become a mom and a social activist, only to wind up as (of all things) the Deputy Mayor of Gotham City.  She resigned from her position in Mayor Alysia Yeoh’s administration to go back to her Bluebird alter ego, not only joining the Birds, but the Justice League as well.</p><p>It was the fourth woman in the cargo bay of the <em>Aerie Three, </em>however, that was the most of note.</p><p>The various builds of the Birds of Prey over the years had had two separate iterations of the superheroine known as Huntress.  The first was Helena Bertinelli, who had retired some years ago to become a full-time high school teacher in Gotham City.</p><p>The second Huntress, the one to whom Helena had passed her mantle and who served on the Birds to this very day, was Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe.  Known as Charlie among her friends, she had been the former teenage metahuman superhero Misfit, whose greatest claim to fame was teleporting an immense rock monster to the surface of the moon during the Battle of Founders Island.</p><p>But Miss Gage-Radcliffe was busy in Sacramento this evening.  A body short, Barbara relented when Harper asked if they could bring her girlfriend along.</p><p>The lady in question being Harper Row’s old Young Justice compatriot Jinny Hex.</p><p>It was a few hours into the <em>Aerie Three’s </em>journey from America to Italy that Harper and Jinny had gotten silly enough that they had exchanged headwear.  Jinny was wearing Bluebird’s blue beanie, while Harper was wearing Jinny’s cowboy hat.  They were sitting across from each other in the middle of the cargo bay on two lawn chairs that they had brought with them, their bare feet nestled against each others’ left hip.</p><p>“Y’alright?” Jinny asked, her Texas accent twanging off the metal sides of the cargo bay in a slight echo.</p><p>“Yeah,” said Harper in reply.</p><p>“Y’sure?  Ya got that… that <em>look.”</em></p><p><em>“What </em>look?”</p><p><em>“That </em>look,” Jinny said.  “The one ya get the Blizzard machine’s busted at Dairy Queen.”</p><p> Jinny turned her head to Barbara.  “How do ya handle this one when she gets all mopey?”</p><p>“I don’t,” Barbara said, not looking up from her book.  “Not my job.  It’s yours.”</p><p>“Darlin’,” Jinny said to Harper, “ya got till the count-a five to say what’s wrong, or I’ll stick my pinky-toe into one of your nostrils…. <em>One…”</em></p><p>Jinny didn’t get any further.  Harper huffed, absent-mindedly picked up the Bluebird mask from her lap, and said:</p><p>“Tim is moving into The Pike.”</p><p>Barbara finally looked up from her book.  The beat in the corner ceased as Dinah stopped kicking the punching bag.</p><p>“Ya don’t say,” said Jinny.</p><p>“Yeah,” Dinah said as she folded her arms.  “Ya don’t say.”</p><p>Tim Drake was a former Robin and current private investigator in Gotham City.  He was also Harper Row’s ex-husband and the father of her child.</p><p>The Pike was an old, empty hotel on Miagani Island in Gotham, owned by Violet Paige, who was the superhero known as<em> “Mother Panic,” </em>and the present amour of one Timothy Jackson Drake.</p><p>“I do say,” Harper said.</p><p>“I thought you were cheerleadin’ those two.”</p><p>“I was.”</p><p>“Then what’s the problem?” Dinah asked.</p><p>“The problem,” Harper said, “is that in the back of my head, I expected Tim to die alone and miserable without me.”</p><p>She looked at the three women with whom she shared a cargo bay, and asked “That doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?”</p><p>“Does it make you a good one?” Dinah asked.</p><p>Harper actually pivoted in her lawn chair to look at Dinah.</p><p>“You didn’t expect Oliver Queen to wither up and die without you?”</p><p>“There is enough daylight between Tim Drake and Oliver Queen to bring life to its own solar system,” said Dinah.</p><p>“How do you mean?” Harper asked.</p><p>“Tim,” said Dinah in reply, “is a kind and decent man who grew into another flavor of a kind and decent man while you yourself were growing into something else.”</p><p>“And Ollie is?”</p><p>Barbara didn’t let Dinah answer.</p><p>“An asshole,” she said.  </p><p>Dinah’s blue eyes lit on fire, and she still had it in her to blush.</p><p>“Babs!”</p><p>“What?” Barbara asked, waging war against the urge to giggle.  “Am I wrong?”</p><p>“You’re not wrong,” Dinah said, “I’m just the only one who gets to say it.”</p><p>Dinah looked at Harper, and said “An asshole.  An asshole who I hoped would grow into something else after I left him.”</p><p>“And did he?”</p><p>“No,” Dinah said.  “Still playing his field in his fifties, the jackass.”</p><p>“And you don’t feel any sort of way about that?”</p><p>“Nope.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“Because it’s none of my business,” Dinah said.  “I married Ryan and got on with my life.  I stopped, looked at where I was, realized that happiness isn’t a zero-sum game, and realized that the only thing stopping<em> now </em>from being better than <em>then </em>was me.”</p><p>“I got a question,” said Jinny.</p><p>“Which is?” asked Harper.</p><p>“Isn’t the Pike, like, one of them old Art Deco hotels?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Annnnnd I am under the assumption that li’l Mattie-Ann’ll be going to The Pike on her weekends with Tim?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“And The Pike isn’t open for business?  It’s a private residence?”</p><p>“What are you getting at?”</p><p>“What I’m sayin’,” Jinny said, “is that when you was Mattie-Ann’s age, you’d-a killed for a big place like that to explore.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Harper said, looking to Barbara as though she’d kill to have an old Art Deco hotel to explore <em>right now. </em>  “She’s gonna need adult supervision, though.”</p><p>“Why ruin her fun?” Jinny asked.  “You tellin’ me you didn’t explore Gotham City alone when you were ten?”</p><p>“I want Mattie-Ann to do better than me.”</p><p>“Yeah, look at you,” Barbara said.  “A member of the Birds of Prey, a pillar of the superhero community, and the former Deputy Mayor of Gotham City.”</p><p>“The shame,” said Dinah.</p><p>“How Mattie-Ann’s gonna live with all that, I got no idea,” said Jinny.</p><p>Harper looked between the three of them, getting redder and redder, until she finally said “You’re hoes, all of you.”</p><p>Dinah was the only one who laughed.</p><p>Harper got up off her lawn chair.  Switching the cowboy hat on her own head with the beanie on Jinny’s, she leaned down, kissed Miss Hex briefly on the lips, and said “Especially you.”</p><p>Jinny gave a grin that might be considered “shit-eating” as Harper walked over to Barbara.  As she did, the rhythm of the cargo bay was reinstated as Dinah began kicking the punching bag again.</p><p>“How’s the book treating you?” Harper asked.</p><p>Barbara nodded, and closed it, knowing damn well that Harper wasn’t asking about the book.</p><p>“It’s funny,” Barbara said.  “You have your first kid, and people will tell you you’re gonna overthink things.  That the first time you’re away, you’ll spend it worrying.  But me?  Now?  Your daughter’s babysitting my son, and… I don’t have a care in the world.”</p><p>Barbara was not prepared for the look on Harper’s face.</p><p>It was not a happy one.</p><p>“Because,” Harper said, addressing Barbara Gordon as though she were a child, “Your son isn’t your first kid.  Jesus Fucking Christ, Babs...”</p>
<hr/><p>Last year, Barbara Gordon was among those of the Batfamily assembled against the onslaught of Ra’s al Ghul and the Arkham Knight.</p><p>Both Dick Grayson and Conner Kent had died, and Barbara had gotten frustrated with both Bruce Wayne’s stubborn refusal to yet again don the armor of Batman, and with Cassandra Wayne’s incompetence as her tenure as the Bat in Gotham had gotten Nightwing and the second Superman killed.</p><p>Barbara rounded up the OG Birds of Prey (who had been in town for Dick’s wake) and went into the Gotham sewers in an attempt to stop the League of Assassins from procuring several barrels of experimental Venom.  There, Barbara Gordon had entered into single combat with Ra’s al Ghul himself.</p><p>And Barbara Gordon had been destroyed.  The injuries sustained in the fight included two shattered legs, and a broken neck.  She was left comatose.</p><p>When she awoke from that coma a couple of days later, she was made aware of a few things that had come to light in the interim.</p><p>Dick Grayson had come back from the dead.</p><p>Conner Kent hadn’t actually died at all.</p><p>The Venom that Barbara had risked her life to retrieve had been, in reality, Lemon-Lime Kool-Aid.</p><p>Cassandra’s incompetence had been a feint, not only to lure Ra’s al Ghul and Astrid Arkham into a false sense of security, but to act as a shot across the bow to the rest of the Batfamily so that they would never again underestimate her intelligence.</p><p>Cassandra Wayne was running around calling herself <em>“Batman,” </em>Stephanie Brown was running around calling herself <em>“Catwoman,” </em>and everyone (up to and including Bruce and Selina Wayne) thought this was just peachy.</p><p>Had Barbara shown patience, she would not be in the world of pain she was then currently in.</p><p>And to top it all off… Barbara Gordon was pregnant.</p><p>The child’s father, the Green Lantern Simon Baz, offered to marry Barbara upon hearing the news.  And for this foolishness, Barbara told him that he wouldn’t get to ask that question again until the child was two years old.</p><p>She had said<em> “I love you, Simon, but you’re here because you </em>want <em>to be here.  Not because I need your help.”</em></p><p>Doctor Jenkins at the Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic told her that she was going to require the use of a wheelchair for a few months, and that might coincide with the birth of the child, complicating the pregnancy.</p><p>But Doctor Jenkins didn’t know about the Kryptonian regeneration chamber that Bruce had in the old Batcave from his Batman days.  Upon hearing from Clark Kent himself that complications to the pregnancy would not arise, Barbara decided to use the chamber.  Seventy-two hours after she had awoken from her coma, Barbara Gordon was back on her feet like nothing had ever happened.</p><p>Under normal circumstances, Barbara would have gutted it out in the wheelchair for a few months the same way she had with the four years of paralysis that were the result of a bullet through the spine from the gun of The Joker.  But she was an expectant mother, and as such, refused to stand on ceremony.  As soon as she walked out the front door of Wayne Manor on her own two feet, she’d ceased going on field operations for the Birds of Prey, acting as lead from behind her computer in the Clock Tower like she did in the old days.</p><p>Seven months later, Barbara Gordon gave birth to James Worthington Gordon III.</p><p>There was, however, some ceremony upon which Barbara Gordon was more than happy to stand.</p><p>One of the first conversations she remembered having in between sedation naps in the clinic was with the newly resurrected Dick Grayson.  He took it upon himself to stump on Cassandra’s behalf, telling her that any grudge or ill will that Barbara was even considering holding against Cassandra would be (in his words) the most Bruce Wayne thing she could possibly do.</p><p>THE NERVE OF THAT ASSHOLE!</p><p>The last she knew, Dick Grayson was dead.  Six years before that, their long relationship had ended when Bruce Wayne had given his adopted daughter Cassandra the mantle of The Bat instead of him.  He said he didn’t think Cassandra could do the job, and Barbara dumped him on his ass, only for him to come back <em>now </em>and say that Cass could do the job after she had made Barbara look and feel foolish?</p><p>The last time Barbara Gordon had seen balls that big, one was about to squish Indiana Jones.</p><p>Ideally, in theory, Barbara could understand, empathize with, and even cheer on the fact that Cassandra hoodwinked everyone on either side in a declaration of both independence and dominance.  </p><p>But… </p><p>But…</p><p>
  <em>Did it have to include me?</em>
</p><p>It wasn’t as though she could fall back, clap her on the shoulder, and say<em> “Boy, you sure showed them.”</em></p><p>Barbara had actually gone to Bruce, dissatisfied with Cassandra, parroting Dick’s line from six years prior about how she couldn’t do the job.</p><p>In the movie of Cassandra’s life, Barbara wouldn’t be the villain.  But she <em>would </em>be an antagonistic force that Cassandra would have to overcome.  Some fool who doubted the hero on her righteous ascension to the throne.</p><p>And<em> “fool” </em>was, in Barbara’s estimation, the proper word.  For all of her considerable intelligence and formidable guile, she had managed to get herself broken for the sake of some Goddamned Kool-Aid.</p><p>A maelstrom of guilt and anger swirled within her, and even now, it showed no signs of abating.</p><p>She hadn’t spoken to Cassandra in a year, not since before she went into the coma.  It wasn’t to say that she never would again, but when she did, it would be on her own terms.</p><p>What those terms were, Barbara Gordon had no idea.</p>
<hr/><p>Barbara felt her expression sour, entirely against her will.  And Harper’s soured right the hell back.</p><p>“That look didn’t scare me when I was eighteen,” Harper said.  “It’s not scaring me now.  It’s been a year, you ass-crack.  When are you calling Cass?  She misses you.”</p><p>Barbara was caught in that netherworld of being unable to say anything and not even <em>wanting </em>to say anything.  She tried to make her expression more fierce, attempting to conceal how flat-footed she had been caught.</p><p>To which Harper rolled her eyes, said “Fine,” and walked back to her lawn chair.</p><p>Barbara stared after her as a voice came in over the intercom.</p><p>“Babs?” a woman asked in a Texas accent not dissimilar to Jinny Hex’s.  “Somethin’ up here could use your attention.”</p><p>Barbara, thankful for the opportunity to bail from the cargo bay, walked out and up the stairs to the cockpit without saying a word.</p><p>Within the cockpit of the <em>Aerie Three, </em>sitting in the pilot’s chair before a veritable amphitheater of blinking esoteric  lights and buttons, was a woman in her early forties who looked as though she were in her early thirties.  Rocking a black miniskirt and… Barbara didn’t know what the top was called.</p><p>
  <em>A tunic?  I dunno.</em>
</p><p>Whatever it was, upon its center was the logo of a black hawk on a red circular field.</p><p>Blonde hair spilled from beneath a black cap.  The lights from the console danced across the slick surface of her blue eyes.  And the scent, which always followed her, of stale beer.</p><p>This was Zinda Blake.  Codename:<em> Lady Blackhawk.</em></p><p>She was born in Texas in the 1920s, before joining the fabled Allied aerial squadron known as <em>“The Blackhawks.” </em> One unstable timewarp later, and she found herself in the present day.</p><p>Apparently temporal displacement did wonders for her skin. </p><p>“You need something?” Barbara asked.</p><p>“Sure did,” Zinda said.  “Have yourself a seat.”</p><p>Barbara sat in the co-pilot’s chair while Zinda brought up a small holographic screen between them.</p><p>“This,” Zinda said, “was uploaded to the internet thirteen minutes ago.”</p><p>Upon the holographic screen between the two women, a video played.  A boy who couldn’t have been over thirteen was speaking in animated Italian in the middle of a darkened field, a beaming smile on his face, as the unmistakable sound of a plane flying overhead almost drowning him out.</p><p>The video ended, and the screen dematerialized into nothing.</p><p>“And?” Barbara asked.</p><p>“And,” said Zinda, “that video was uploaded from the Eye-talian interior, near that town we’re supposed to go to.  Pizza Ferret.”</p><p>“Pizzoferrato.”</p><p>“‘S what I said,”  Zinda scratched the side of her nose before she said “Anything about that video funny to you?”</p><p>Barbara rolled it around in her head.  “No.  Why?”</p><p>“The sound of the plane overhead?”</p><p>“There are planes everywhere.”</p><p>“Not over parts of Italy with so few people,” said Zinda. “And not that kind of plane.  I can spot planes by ear, and that ain’t a passenger plane.  That’s the kind of plane we’re in right now.  Maybe not as fancy, but it’s built for carrying troops.”</p><p>As Barbara furrowed her brow, Zinda asked a very important question.</p><p>“Babs… Are you sure we’re the only ones lookin’ for this Crazy Jane character?”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>V.<br/>
</em>
    <em>Dodging Lions and Wasting Time</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>The black putrescence in the wall behind Lady Shiva began to spread.  It was slow and languorous, but that oily black pool was indeed getting bigger.</p><p>Barbara swallowed one of the vanilla wafers from her MRE and asked “Why are you here?”</p><p>Lady Shiva frowned.  “That is most assuredly <em>not </em>telling me about Cassandra.”</p><p>“Humor me,” said Barbara.  “I told you why I’m here.  Robotman went to Nightwing with a lead on Crazy Jane, and Nightwing came to the Birds.”</p><p>Which was technically true.  Dick didn’t contact Barbara with the info given to him by Cliff Steele.  No, Dick went to Dinah.  Barbara imagined that Dick would feel skittish and uncomfortable coming to her with this info.</p><p>And he damn well should have felt skittish and uncomfortable.</p><p>“Last time I checked,” Barbara said, “you were in Iron Heights.”</p><p>More than that.  The first time Lady Shiva met her daughter Cassandra, she tried to force the same kind of fight to the death that she had engineered with all of the other martial arts masters she’d met over the years.  Cassandra, then known as Black Bat, obliged…</p><p>...or so it seemed.</p><p>Shiva hadn’t even had time to get into her stance before Conner Kent (former Young Justice member, second Superman after Clark Kent, and Cassandra’s boyfriend at the time) flew up behind her and smacked upside the back of the skull.  Shiva woke up ten hours later in a cell in Iron Heights awaiting trial, and minus six teeth.</p><p>Barbara figured Shiva must have dipped into her considerable savings to get dental implants put in while she was in the clink.</p><p>“I was,” Shiva said.  “I was in Iron Heights?”</p><p>“And?”</p><p>“And I’m surprised that someone as intelligent and savvy as yourself feels the need to ask,” Shiva said.  “Someone paid a great deal of money to get me out of that cell.”</p><p>“You understand my curiosity.”</p><p>Shiva regarded Barbara as though she were an ant skirting the border of a picnic blanket, and Shiva was packing a magnifying glass in her arsenal.</p><p>Until she simply shrugged, and took a sip of the red food drink that came with the MRE.</p><p>“I am not being paid for my silence,” Shiva said.  “How many bells does the name <em>‘Jeffrey Tullman’ </em>ring?”</p><p>
  <em>Well, it rings a couple.</em>
</p><p>“Head of TullTech,” Barbara said.  “Tech firm out of Pittsburgh.  What interest does he have in Crazy Jane?”</p><p>“None whatsoever,” Shiva said.  “But he is a former LexCorp executive, from the days before Lex himself went to prison and before Selina Wayne bought the company and gutted it.  Jeffrey Tullman was the one who scouted out Niles Caulder and Steve Dayton for R&amp;D.”</p><p>“You’re here for the Dayton Device,” Barbara said.  “The one Sportsmaster came for.”</p><p>“Correct.”</p><p>“On the same night the Birds of Prey came to look for Crazy Jane?”</p><p>“Why do you ask that as though this corner of the universe doesn’t run on coincidence?” Shiva asked.</p><p>And Barbara had to admit that she had a point.</p><p>“This is Mister Tullman’s first stab at illegal enterprise,” Shiva said.  “Spent a pittance on Chechen mercenaries.  Their plane.  Their MREs upon which we currently feast.”</p><p>“They spend a pittance on you?” Barbara asked.  “Seems like a step down from your pre-jailbird days.”</p><p>“It is,” said Shiva.  “Jeffrey Tullman set me loose in an environment where I’ve no resources and no support system.  In a world where Ra’s al Ghul is in prison and the League of Assassins is no more. A world where Nanda Parbat itself fell before a horde of Amazons.”</p><p>A year ago, Barbara Gordon woke up from a coma knocked up in a world that didn’t make sense.  And of all the things she’d missed during her nap, the part where Wonder Woman and Batwoman led a seafaring raiding party on League headquarters at Nanda Parbat was the part she <em>really </em>wished she’d been awake for.</p><p>“Am I correct in assuming that my daughter Cassandra is responsible for all this?” Shiva asked.</p><p>Barbara Gordon wasn’t able to keep the pride out of her voice.</p><p>“You are.”</p><p>But that pride extinguished itself before the smile could get to her lips.</p><p>Barbara remembered the night Black Bat hoodwinked Lady Shiva into eating shit from an eighty-mile-an-hour backhand upside the skull courtesy of Conner Kent.  She was proud then.  Proud enough to call Dinah and tell her what went down.</p><p>Dinah had been furious.  She had trained under Shiva.  While knowing her bottomless capacity for evil, the relationship between Shiva and Black Canary had been a complex one.  And Dinah thought that Shiva deserved a more worthy fate than getting squashed from behind by Superman.  And the fact that The Thwack Heard ‘Round the World had been engineered by Shiva’s birth daughter stuck Dinah Lance-Choi as seedy.</p><p>To which Barbara had simply responded:</p><p>
  <em>“Cass doesn’t owe her anything.”</em>
</p><p>But at this very moment, thousands of miles from home, she hadn’t spoken to the woman that she looked upon as a daughter in a year.</p><p>Barbara Gordon, after all, had an ego to protect.</p><p>And after that, Barbara had to wonder what Cass owed her.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>VI.</em>
    <em><br/>
</em>
    <em>Eldritch Horror, Italian Style</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO - ONE HOUR AGO</b>
</p><p>“Say <em>what </em>now?” Oracle asked.</p><p>The <em>Aerie Three </em>had set down in stealth mode just outside of Pizzoferrato.  The massive transport plane descended from the sky with less noise than a farting cricket.</p><p>Bluebird and Jinny Hex were already outside, fully costumed and equipped, standing in the middle of a field of grass just beyond the open door of the Aerie Three’s cargo bay.</p><p>Oracle and Black Canary were still in the bay, with Lady Blackhawk near the staircase to the cockpit.</p><p>And the green hologram of Oracle’s mask told the entire story.  She was pissed.</p><p>“I need to tell you who<em> runs </em>this fucking team?” Oracle asked.</p><p>Black Canary had the placid, blank expression of someone who wasn’t buying what Oracle was saying.  And just seeing it, Oracle felt like she was holding up a line at the grocery store by screaming about her expired coupon.</p><p>Which just pissed her off more.</p><p>“Well,” Black Canary, “I had everyone else fill out a one question survey.  Know what the question was?”</p><p>“You do realize you’re being an asshole about this.”</p><p>“The question,” Black Canary said, “was<em> ‘Who has a five-month-old-son at home?’ </em>  Turns out, you were the only one who could answer yes.  Imagine that.”</p><p>“You think I spent all these hours on this plane, flying from Gotham to here just to stay behind?”</p><p>“Babs…”</p><p>“This was… This was my <em>return! </em>  I <em>destroyed myself </em>getting into shape for this!  I am <em>not running ops from the fucking plane!”</em></p><p>
  <em>“Babs!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“What?”</em>
</p><p>Black Canary put her hands on her hips, huffed, and asked:</p><p>“You know how this world works, right?”</p><p>“I don’t understand what th--”</p><p>“You <em>know, </em>” Black Canary said.  “This isn’t <em>just </em>about you getting hurt or dying out there.  This is about you dying out there, and Little Jimmy Gordon finding me in the Old Folks Home in a few decades and putting a bullet in my ass for getting his mom killed.”</p><p>“Do you seriously… <em>seriously… </em>think that my infant son is going to get revenge on you somewhere down the line if something bad happens to me tonight?”</p><p>“The Arkham Knight did it,” Black Canary said.  “It’s not impossible for your kid to do it, too.  Look, it’s one thing if we did a search when we knew no one was in that villa, but we know for a fact there is.  On top of that, the last time you were in the field, you got put in a coma during a mission we didn’t need to be on.”</p><p>Now<em> that </em>pissed Oracle off.  She opened her mouth to say something, but Canary beat her to it.</p><p>“Humor me.”</p><p>“Dinah…”</p><p>“Humor.  Me.  I’ll owe you a favor later, but you’ll follow a fucking order now.”</p><p>Oracle took a deep breath.</p><p>Then another.</p><p>Before she finally said:</p><p>“Fine.”</p><p>“Good,” Black Canary said.  “Hug it out?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Hug it out?”</p><p>
  <em>“No.”</em>
</p><p>“Hug it out?”</p><p>And Oracle’s arms were around Black Canary before she said no anyway.  Barbara Gordon knew herself well enough to know how rare it was that she could find someone on this planet with whom she was constitutionally incapable of staying angry.</p><p>And Dinah Lance-Choi was such a person.</p><p>“That’s a girl,” Black Canary said, patting Oracle’s back.</p><p>They stayed that way, before Oracle heard Bluebird calling from outside the <em>Aerie Three.</em></p><p>“We goin’, or what?”</p>
<hr/><p>There were three APCs outside the villa.</p><p>Whoever had arrived in them had to be dealt with.</p><p>Bluebird still remembered stealth-training with Tim, Steph, and Cass in the Batcave back in the old days.  She’d taken to it like a duck to water, and retained most of it now.</p><p>But Jinny Hex (bless her Earthly soul and shapely behind) had never gotten the hang of being sneaky.</p><p>So by the time Bluebird, Jinny Hex, and Black Canary made it to the hedge maze outside the front of the Villa Sammartino, Bluebird had told Jinny to step right in Bluebird’s footsteps, so she didn’t trip over anything or alert anyone.</p><p>There was but one entrance to the hedge maze, with a forking path that led to the greater complexities within.</p><p>Bluebird reckoned that were she invited to this place by whoever owned the villa, and he to navigate a maze to get to the front door, she’d have called the guy, told him to go fuck himself, and then left.</p><p>Black Canary, who was no slouch in the stealth department, jerked a thumb to her left.  That’s where she was going.  Which meant Bluebird and Jinny were going right.</p><p>As Bluebird made note to which direction in which they were headed, she kept an ear out, and heard…</p><p>...nothing.</p><p>No birds, no bugs, and no goons.</p><p>Either the guys who came in those APCs were ninjas as opposed to soldiers, or--</p><p>
  <b>“SKREEEEEEEEEEEEE!”</b>
</p><p>The green of the hedge maze shuddered in the noise.  Bluebird and Jinny were driven to their knees in agony.  Bluebird felt air leave her throat in a pitiful groan, but she couldn’t hear it.  And if Jinny did the same, she couldn’t hear that, either.</p><p>It was a Canary Cry.</p>
<hr/><p>Oracle and Lady Blackhawk sat up in the cockpit of the <em>Aerie Three. </em>  Oracle felt her eyes begin to glaze over just looking at the holographic read-out on the right side of the dash.</p><p>“How’s the young-un?” Lady Blackhawk asked, apropos of nothing.</p><p>“Jimmy’s fine,” Oracle said.  “He’s… He’s a five-month-old.”  </p><p>She looked over at Lady Blackhawk, who was slowly opening and closing her mouth, apparently running through questions in her mind at break-neck speed, and discarding them just as rapidly.</p><p>Dinah and Helena spared no expense for their questions about Little Jimmy Gordon’s upbringing, and the toll it took on her finances and her body.  Everything from breast-feeding (from which Barbara Gordon abstained) to the toll on her finances (which, in her case, was negligible).</p><p>But Zinda <em>“Lady Blackhawk” </em>Blake treated all aspects of biological motherhood with the same squirmy revulsion of an arachnophobe walking through the bug hut at the zoo with their eyes closed.  Knowing that even the tiniest sliver of knowledge, no matter how distant or innocuous, would contain ideas or imagery that would scar them for life.</p><p>Oracle was strongly considering telling Lady Blackhawk about the time Jimmy spit-up so hard that his pearly projectile vomit launched six feet and onto the gray carpet in the Clock Tower living room in the rough shape of Rhode Island when the holographic read-out started beeping.</p><p>Her eyes flitted to the console… and saw that Black Canary’s vitals had started spiking.</p><p>Oracle opened her mouth to explain… something, when both she and Lady Blackhawk heard something.  Something quarter of a mile away, and clear enough to be heard through the cold steel and humming machinery of the<em> Aerie Three.</em></p><p>Dinah Lance-Choi’s patented Canary Cry.</p><p>Oracle knew Black Canary.  She knew that that cry was what listed her officially as a metahuman.  She knew that the cry was of such a strength that it could, and had, deafened a rampaging Kryptonian. And she knew that, given Dinah’s rigorous discipline in the realm of martial arts, Black Canary never used that Cry against an unpowered opponent, no matter how steep the odds or dire the situation.</p><p>Which told Oracle that whatever sought to contend with Black Canary at present… wasn’t human.</p>
<hr/><p>Bluebird and Jinny Hex hit the deck as the green wall of shrubbery to their left exploded.</p><p>The ringing in Bluebird’s ears had diminished to an extent that she could hear Jinny ask “Y’alright?”</p><p>Then she looked up.</p><p>A black and towering something had Black Canary in its slick, runny maw.  It extended to a height of ten feet, the width of a luxury sedan.</p><p>Above the din of her own head, Bluebird could Black Canary scream the word “NO!” as this oily, putrescent thing swallowed her whole.</p>
<hr/><p>Oracle felt her heart stop.</p><p>Staring at the vital read-out, her mouth hung open as her brain caught fire.</p><p>Black Canary just flatlined.</p>
<hr/><p>Bluebird could hear Jinny yell “Move!  MOVE NOW!”</p><p>She got to her feet, and fixed her eyes on Jinny Hex’s beige duster as they tried to navigate their way back out of the hedge maze.  And as more of her hearing returned, she could hear the oily black monstrosity lurch and pursue her.</p><p>Bluebird wouldn’t dare risk looking back for an instant.  Couldn’t play the odds to unholster her taser pistols and fire over her shoulder at that vile, disgusting whatever-the-fuck-it-was.</p><p>Her legs pumped, one in front of the other, when…</p><p>When something wrapped around her left ankle.  It yanked, hard, and she was sent sprawling, her forehead banging off the thin carpet of grass that made up the floor of the hedge maze.</p><p>She looked and saw a thick, black liquid tentacle attached to her boot.  The tentacle extended from the same disgusting black maw that ate Black Canary.</p><p>Bluebird was transfixed by the sight, and only when Jinny Hex grabbed her shoulders in an attempt to pull her back did she reach beneath her leather jacket for her pistols.</p>
<hr/><p>Black Canary flatlined.</p><p>Bluebird flatlined.</p><p>And Jinny Hex’s vitals were dangerously high.</p><p>Oracle was only vaguely aware that it was like listening to a boxing match over the radio.  She and Lady Blackhawk were entirely divorced from the aura and intangibles of whatever was happening at the Villa Sammartino, left only to be struck by the pure and unalloyed reality of who lived and who died.</p><p>Until, finally, Jinny’s readings bottomed out as well.</p><p>Oracle stood and looked at the three flatlines, only dimly aware that Lady Blackhawk had put her hands to her face.</p><p>The ground team for the Birds of Prey had been thoroughly wiped.</p><p>Oracle took a ragged breath.  She knew, academically, she couldn’t let this get to her.  But the whooshing air of the <em>Aerie Three’s </em>climate sounded an awful lot like screaming.</p><p>“Lady Blackhawk,” she finally said.</p><p>Silence in reply.</p><p>“Lady Blackhawk,” she said again.</p><p>And Zinda Blake stood as well.  She straightened her miniskirt, checked the cuffs of her top (or tunic or whatever) and fixed Barbara Gordon with glassy eyes.</p><p>“In five minutes,” Oracle said, “I want you airborne.  Five minutes after that, I want you sending out the SOS.  Far and wide, on all channels and frequencies.”</p><p>“How come you’re telling me this like you’re not gonna be on this here plane with me when I do it?” Lady Blackhawk asked.</p><p>Oracle activated her green holographic mask.  “You know why.”</p><p>“Dinah, Harper, and Jinny die, and you’re gonna go investigatin’ out there alone?”</p><p>“It’s protocol.”</p><p>“It’s bullshit,” Lady Blackhawk said.  “Come up with me, we send out the SOS together, and we get someone to look into it that don’t just have hackin’ skills and a fancy mask as their only powers.  Wait for Goddamned Superman!”</p><p>Oracle sighed, trying to get the cacophony on her head into some kind of order.</p><p>“A year ago,” Oracle said, “Superman was killed in Gotham City by the Arkham Knight.  Or so everyone thought.  He and Black Bat faked his death to lure the Arkham Knight and Ra’s al Ghul into a false sense of security.  Nevertheless, ARGUS had to move Heaven and Earth to keep the information of Superman’s death from the public in order to avert a panic.  Someone has to do perimeter investigation on what just happened in that villa.  So someone <em>like </em>Superman, <em>like </em>Wonder Woman, <em>like </em>Aquaman doesn’t come down here and get destroyed by the same thing that <em>just destroyed our friends.  </em>So we <em>don’t </em>have a global panic, <em>or a diplomatic incident, </em>or a <em>WAR WITH FUCKING ATLANTIS!”</em></p><p>Oracle stopped herself, and took a breath.  The expression on Lady Blackhawk’s face, for the most part, did not change.</p><p>“You need to be in boss mode so ya don’t fall apart?” Lady Blackhawk asked.</p><p>“I’m not even dignifying that with a response,” Oracle said.  “You’re up in five.  I’ll signal when I’m done.”</p><p>“If you’re done.”</p><p>“That’s right.”</p><p>“So if you don’t signal, I’ll just tell your kids you love them,” Lady Blackhawk said.  “Jimmy and Cass.”</p><p>Of all the things to throw Barbara Gordon off her game…</p>
<hr/><p>The <em>Aerie Three</em> lifted off, silent and invisible, five minutes later like Oracle demanded.</p><p>The quarter mile between the plane and the villa passed quickly beneath the deep blue midnight sky, with a static playing between Oracle’s ears.  She did her best to get lost in it.  </p><p>The hedge maze at the front of the villa had been completely destroyed, with holes and massive gaps in the shrubbery that made navigation easier.</p><p>This was where her friends died…</p><p>...but Oracle couldn’t help but notice that there wasn’t any blood, let alone any bodies.</p><p>There weren’t any new faces from those APCs out front, either.  This wasn’t the simple matter of Black Canary, Bluebird, and Jinny Hex losing a firefight. Whatever got them, got the APC guys, too.</p><p>A couple of minutes of navigation through the destroyed hedge maze, and Oracle found the front door of the Villa Sammartino…</p><p>...and in the doorway, amidst the splintered of the white wooden door that marked the entrance, a black and oily… something, retreated into the doorway.</p><p>It was supposed to be a perimeter investigation.  To set the stage for someone with actual superpowers to show up and put this right.</p><p>
  <em>But that fucking thing killed Dinah.</em>
</p><p>And she ran right after it.</p><p>The oily tendrils retreated into the foyer as Oracle bounded after them.  The villa’s interior was slathered in slick darkness that seemed to be receding into a door on the underside of the main staircase.</p><p>That doorway led down, down, down into the cellar, the dark tendrils receding from her footfalls.  Oracle set foot on the basement floor and… and…</p><p>“Huh…”</p><p>The word escaped Oracle’s lips beneath her green holographic mask.  Amid the emotion and tension, the oddity quite simply amused her.</p><p>On the far wall of the cellar, amid the slick blackness, was the image of a tropical island ensconced in its own sphere of sunlight.  The island seemed vast, with gorgeous white beaches and tight rows of Greek-style houses.  All very Mediterranean and charming.</p><p>“Huh…” Oracle said again as the island shimmered and waved.  As the reality of the situation settled upon her, she found it rather amusing in spite of it all.</p><p>It was paint.</p><p>Black Canary, Bluebird, Jinny Hex, and the APC guys were devoured by a painting.</p><p>Oracle did not hear the footsteps behind her… but she did feel the hand on her right shoulder.</p><p>She whipped around and saw a beautiful, ageless Asian woman in a black leather coat not dissimilar to her own.  Oracle was amused a second ago.  She was terrified now.</p><p>Because she was face-to-face with Lady Shiva.</p><p>And Lady Shiva seemed just as amused by what was on that cellar wall as Oracle herself had been mere seconds ago.</p><p>Without looking at her, Lady Shiva spoke.</p><p>"Miss Gordon," she said.  "You will not leave this house alive.  It is entirely up to you whether or not you have a last meal before you do."</p><p>And Oracle hoped that Lady Blackhawk got that SOS off.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Part Three (of Six)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>VII.<br/>
There is No Joy in Pittsburgh</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>GOTHAM CITY</b>
</p><p>Welcome home.</p><p>The air on the western edge of the mainland still glows pink in the lingering after-effects of the beautiful sunset that only the Gotham skyline can provide.</p><p>Standing upright in defiance in that rose glow on the western part of the East End, like a proud middle finger, is the Gotham City Clock Tower.  In between the building’s four directional clock faces visible from street level, there rests three floors of a private residence.  And this private residence belongs to one Barbara Gordon. </p><p>At the particular moment this narrative concerns, however, Miss Gordon is not present.</p><p>Her infant son is, however.  James Worthington Gordon III.  Five months old, and currently having his diaper changed in his bedroom by his babysitter, the ten-year-old Matilda Ann Row-Drake.  </p><p>She being ten years old, however, this babysitter needed babysitters of her own.</p><p>The two charged with that particular task sat on the couch in the living room of the residence’s top floor.  Sitting on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, out-of-date history textbooks on their laps…</p><p>...and, strangely, baseball on television.</p>
<hr/><p>If Aaliyah Ramsay had to mark the one thing that had changed the most between her time in Parisot, North Carolina and her time in Gotham City (besides the obvious, of course), it would have to be all of the Goddamned coffee.</p><p>A year ago, fifteen-year-old Aaliyah Ramsay was a high school cheerleader at a podunk high school in a podunk town.  Both the town and the school were destroyed by the dual forces of Ra’s al Ghul and the Arkham Knight to drive Aaliyah to Gotham City and into the protection of Bruce Wayne.</p><p>For, unbeknownst to her, Aaliyah was the daughter of David <em>“Black Manta” </em>Hyde and Talia al Ghul.  Ra’s would not suffer any pretenders to the throne of The Demon, nor the leadership of the League of Assassins.  He had driven Aaliyah to Gotham City so that he might destroy her, along with anyone who might stand against him, in one fell swoop, as well as taking Cassandra Wayne as his bride.</p><p>Ra’s accomplished none of his goals.  Cassandra, taking the title of Batman, had outsmarted not only Ra’s al Ghul and the Arkham Knight, but almost everyone on her own side as well.  Gotham had been saved.  The League had been torn out at the root in Nanda Parbat by three boats full of pissed-off Amazons.  All of the Lazarus Pits on Earth had been destroyed by ARGUS.  Astrid Arkham was in a mental health facility in Bludhaven.  And Ra’s al Ghul would die in prison.</p><p>And after all was said and done, Cassandra Wayne (in her capacity as Batman) and Carrie Kelley (in her capacity as Robin) had offered Aaliyah the mantle of Batgirl.  She would be the third.</p><p>Initially, Aaliyah had refused.  The whole superhero thing seemed weird to her, with goofy costumes and people popping right the hell out of their graves at a moment’s notice.  At which point, Carrie had reminded her that if she became Batgirl, she would see the delightful (and appetizing) Jon Lane-Kent a lot more than if she followed her parents to Michigan.</p><p>So… Aaliyah had been Batgirl for a year now.</p><p>
  <em>Stupid boys.  Making me do stupid stuff like signing up to get costumed ass-kickings...</em>
</p><p>The first few months of training had been a non-stop cavalcade of welts and bruises training under Cassandra Wayne and Stephanie Brown.  Of learning detective skills from Tim Drake.  Of learning Gotham City history from Violet Paige.  The ins and outs of Gotham’s geography from The Signal himself, Duke Thomas.</p><p>It was grueling.  And the thing that helped the most… was coffee.</p><p>In North Carolina, she lived on bottled water and smoothies.  Not that she couldn’t have acquired her taste for coffee back in Parisot.  It’s just that it wasn’t as easy to find.  She either had to go across town to the McDonalds, or make it in her kitchen, and life was too damned short for either.</p><p>But coffee was on every corner in Gotham City.  This dingy gothic hellhole seemed to run on it.  She didn’t have much of a school year last year.  Her school was destroyed in late October, and she spent the rest of the year as a Batgirl in training.  Batman, Catwoman, the ex-Robin, Mother Panic, and The Signal didn’t do the eight-thirty-to-three thing like schools did.  Their training went early and long into the night.</p><p>And she needed coffee to keep up.</p><p>Aaliyah could feel the change it brought within her.  She could feel the tension.  She could feel her shoulders bunching up.  She could feel her speech getting faster and faster by the month.  Not only that, but she could <em>see </em>her naturally dark skin get lighter and lighter.  More nighttime hours, and Gotham felt like a broad canyon over which there was but a narrow strip of sunlight, even at high noon.  Far from the open expanse of semi-rural Tarheelia.</p><p>Aaliyah Ramsay (or Aaliyah Hyde, or Aaliyah al Ghul, or Aaliyah Whatever) of Parisot, North Carolina was mentally, spiritually, and now <em>physically </em>becoming a citizen of Gotham City.</p><p>Now sixteen-year-old-Aaliyah (as well as sixteen-year-old Carrie) were both enrolled in Gotham Academy.  Aaliyah’s transcripts were… <em>fudged… </em>a bit so the two girls could remain in the same year.</p><p>Aaliyah, in her gray Academy slacks and white uniform blouse, took a sip of Cafe Bustelo (dark as a motherfucker and stronger than <em>two </em>motherfuckers) from her blue coffee cup, upon the side of which was the Superman/Superwoman/Supergirl/Superboy logo.  Or <em>“The Crest of the Kryptonian House of El,” </em>if one felt like being a pedantic skidmark about the whole thing.  And when it came to boys as pretty as Jon Lane-Kent, Aaliyah oftentimes did.</p><p>She waited for Carrie’s next question.  For the age of superheroes had been so long that there now existed parts of the Gotham Academy sophomore American History syllabus dedicated to it.</p><p>Carrie Kelley, dressed identically and sitting next to her on the couch. Had her history book open on her lap.  She whipped a lock of light red hair out of her freckled face before she began.</p><p>“Alright,” Carrie said, “we start off easy.  In what year did declassified US military documents reveal that the American military made contact with Themyscira and recruit Wonder Woman to the Allies during World War II?”</p><p>“1942,” said Aaliyah.</p><p>“Correct.  Name the prison that Amanda Waller recruited Suicide Squad members from, and the state it’s in.”</p><p>“Belle Reve in Louisiana.”</p><p>“Very good.  Name the supervillain whose attempted assassination of Governor Hayden Kimball of Pennsylvania resulted in what is known as <em>‘The Shazam Act?’”</em></p><p>“Thaddeus Sivana.”</p><p>“Right,” said Carrie.  “You got your three?”</p><p>“I do,” said Aaliyah.  “You ready?”</p><p>“Yup.”</p><p>“According to most accounts,” Aaliyah began, “who was the first superhero to die in Gotham City’s Battle of Founders Island?”</p><p>“Easy,” said Carrie.  “Aquaman.”</p><p>Aaliyah nodded.  “Name the eighth Green Lantern of Earth.”</p><p>Carrie furrowed her brow.  “Okay… Jo Mullein is ninth.”</p><p>“Not what I asked, but yeah.”</p><p>“And Babs’ boo, Simon Baz?  He was the seventh.”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“So eighth is… Jessica… <em>Fuck, </em>what’s her last name?”</p><p>“I don’t think Missus Brewster will allow that one on the test,” Aaliyah said.  “Christ, you met her at Dick Grayson’s wake before he popped back up a few days later.  I was standing right there.” </p><p>“Jessicaaaaaa.... Ummm…”  Carrie’s eyes lit up when she said <em>“Cruz! </em>  Jessica Cruz!”</p><p><em>"There </em>we go!”</p><p>“Alright, last one.”</p><p>“Okay,” Aaliyah said.  She cracked her knuckles, rubbed her hands together, and said…</p><p>“Name three alters and powersets for the former Doom Patrol member Crazy Jane.”</p><p>“Fuck you.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Fuck.  You.”</p><p>
  <em>“What?”</em>
</p><p>“Name three?” Carrie asked, slamming her book closed.  “That’s cheating.  You get three questions, not six.”</p><p>“Five.”</p><p>“Huh?”</p><p>“Five,” Aaliyah said.  “The two questions I asked, plus the three identities.  It adds up to five.  But the last one counts as one, same as it would on the test.”</p><p>Carrie blinked a couple of times before she said “Fuck you” yet again.</p><p>“Are you making a show because you’re upset?” Aaliyah asked.  “Or are you making a show because you don’t know?”<br/>
<br/>
“I <em>know.”</em></p><p><em>“Do </em>you, now?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Then get to… Y’know…”</p><p>“There’s, uh, there’s Flit!” Carrie said.  “That’s the one that teleports a whole bunch.”</p><p>“That’s one.”</p><p>“Annnnnnnnnnd… The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.”</p><p>“Who does what?”</p><p>“Who makes paintings that come alive.”</p><p>“Well, they’re interactable, but I get what you mean.  And?”</p><p>“And…”</p><p>
  <em>“And?”</em>
</p><p>“Annnd… Holy shit, <em>there they are!”</em></p><p>The change in demeanor was so sudden that Aaliyah twitched, as though the recipient of a particularly cheap jump-scare.  Carrie, her green eyes wide as saucers, was pointing at the holographic television screen, which was tuned to the app from Major League Baseball that allowed the streaming of every game.</p><p>Fifteen years ago, the supervillain Cluemaster executed a vicious attack on Game Seven of the World Series in Gotham City that cost almost seventy thousand innocent civilians their lives.  It also had the effect of robbing Gotham of its Major League team.</p><p>For those folks of Gotham City who still held a love of the game, they had to find a team elsewhere upon which to hang their dreams.  Most picked the New York Yankees, because grief did not allow for shame.</p><p>But for Cassandra Wayne, who had started watching baseball during that Gotham City World Series berth and fell hopelessly in love with the national pastime, her passions fell to the ancient and venerated Pittsburgh Pirates.</p><p>The poor, poor fool.</p><p>Established in 1887 as the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, the Pirates became known for two things in the modern era.  </p><p>The first was the beautiful and impeccably maintained PNC Park, where the Pirates played their home games.  </p><p>The second was for sucking.</p><p>Indeed, the game on the television was a losing effort on behalf of the Pittsburgh Pirates against the New York Mets, the score being four to one.  The Mets were going to the postseason.  The Pirates weren’t.  </p><p>It was one of the last handful of games of the season for the miserable, lowly Pirates.  PNC Park was sparsely populated.  But two spectators with good seats in the left field stands were of particular interest to the television crew.  They were definitely of interest to Carrie Kelley, who had ground their study session to a halt to point them out.</p><p>The graphic on the bottom of the screen said:</p><p>
  <b>
    <em>The Pittsburgh Pirates welcome<br/>
</em>
  </b>
  <b>
    <em>CASSANDRA WAYNE &amp; STEPHANIE BROWN!</em>
  </b>
</p><p>Cassandra Wayne was the adopted daughter of noted Gazillionaire Bruce Wayne, as well as a well-renowned stage actor in her own right.  Stephanie Brown was a billionaire herself, having inherited the personal wealth of Kate Kane (who had been declared legally dead after she went off to Themyscira and joined the Amazons in her capacity as Batwoman).  Miss Brown had devoted ungodly sums to charitable endeavours around the world, and had become a celebrity while doing so.</p><p>They were also Batman and Catwoman, but only a precious few knew that.  With those two superheroic luminaries in Pittsburgh at present, The Signal and Mother Panic presided over Gotham City for the evening.</p><p>Cass was wearing a yellow and black plaid flannel over a black tank top.  Over her eyes were the blocky eyeglasses that compensated for her dyslexia, and atop her head was her Pirates ball cap.  Steph was wearing a purple sweater.  She was resting her head on Cass’ left shoulder.</p><p>“I looked up the Pittsburgh Pirates a few days ago when I was bored,” Carrie said.  “You know in the 1930s, they had a player named Ugly Johnny Dickshot?”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“No joke,” Carrie said.  “Ugly Johnny Dickshot.”</p><p>And Aaliyah’s first instinct was to say:</p><p>“That can’t be right.”</p><p>“I’m serious.”</p><p>“No,” Aaliyah said, turning her gaze back to her textbook and flipping through some pages.  “That’s a Firestorm villain.”</p><p>Carrie started laughing.</p><p>“I’m not kidding,” Aaliyah said, raising her voice over her best friend’s laughter.  “I distinctly remember seeing Ugly Johnny Dickshot somewhere in this b--”</p><p>A door closed, and Aaliyah looked up.</p><p>To say that Little Jimmy Gordon had his own room was somewhat a misnomer.  It was, in actuality, the Clock Tower’s broad and expansive holoroom, which provided hardlight facsimiles of people and places in the pursuit of combat training.  Given the room’s utility, it was the easiest room in the Clock Tower to soundproof: Just program soundproof material onto the walls and ceiling, and you’re done.   </p><p>Emerging from the holoroom, wearing a pair of jeans and a gray button-up done all the way to the top (for some reason) was Matilda Ann Row-Drake.  She had shoulder-length brown hair, icy blue eyes, and the high sweet smell of what Aaliyah Ramsay could only commodify as <em>“Baby Stuff.”</em></p><p>For of the three young ladies, Mattie-Ann was the one who seemed to take to Jimmy in the way in which the babysitter of an infant should.  Aaliyah liked the tiny beige creature well enough, but not enough to get anywhere near the various fluids and wastes that five-month-olds secrete as a matter of course.  As for Carrie, Aaliyah noticed that her distaste bordered on an honest phobia.  The smell of even fresh diapers seemed to make Carrie Kelley nauseous, and she referred to Little Jimmy as <em>“The Bazling.”</em></p><p>But Mattie-Ann?  Took to the little one right away.  Her interest in Little Jimmy seemed on the academic side, as she seemed less enamoured and more fascinated.  But this was Mattie-Ann, and her fascination with, well, e <em>verything, </em>lent to her general air of eccentricity.</p><p>“He down?” Aaliyah asked.</p><p>“He’s down,” said Mattie-Ann.</p><p>“And the monitoring’s up?”</p><p>Mattie-Ann looked over to the other side of the room, where Oracle’s vast and intimidating computer set-up took up the entirety of a wall.</p><p>“I just have to push the button,” Mattie-Ann said.</p><p>Carrie seemed to shrink into her end of the couch.</p><p>“And, uhh… And you washed your hands?”</p><p>Mattie-Ann’s pale blue eyes went wide.  Her mouth slackened.  She pointed at Carrie and said...</p><p>“Noooooooooo.”</p><p>...which Aaliyah instantly spotted as a lie.  The tiny hairs on Mattie-Ann’s forearm were damp.  But Aaliyah did not feel that this was information Carrie needed to hear, and Mattie-Ann seemed to agree.</p><p>Carrie launched herself off the end of the couch as Mattie-Ann advanced on her, her damp hand sticking out in front of her, Marley angling for the soul of a plainly terrified Scrooge.</p><p>Aaliyah cackled.</p><p>“Mattie, get back.”</p><p>“Give me a huuuuuuuuuug.”</p><p>“I swear to fucking God…”</p><p>“I looooooove youuuuuuuuuuu.”</p><p>
  <em>“Don’t come near me!”</em>
</p><p>“But I <em>loooooooooove youuuuuuuuu.”</em></p><p>Aaliyah cackled louder.</p><p>But something had to ruin the fun.</p><p>As Mattie-Ann chased Carrie around the couch, every light in the Clock Tower turned red, and started blinking on and off.  And the monitors on the vast and intimidating Oracle PC rig broadcast three simple letters:</p><p>
  <b>S.O.S.</b>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>VIII.<br/>
</em>
    <em>Masterpiece</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>SOMEWHERE</b>
</p><p>Water entered Bluebird’s mouth.</p><p>It was salty.</p><p>She was surprised to find salt water in the belly of the oily Lovercraftian beast that swallowed her whole.</p><p>She was even more surprised to find daylight.</p><p>But the water that she was coughing up, as well as the light that was turning her closed eyelids a bright red, told her that she was not stewing in the digestive juices of an as-yet-unknown form of carnivorous life.</p><p>It told her she was underwater at a beach.</p><p>She brought her feet down, and they hit something solid.  She brought her hands down, and they found sand.  Bluebird stood, eyes still closed, and felt the sun hit her directly after she emerged.</p><p>Bluebird heard something.  It was loud and panicky, but there was water (apparently seawater) in her ears.</p><p>She opened her eyes, and…</p><p>..saw that the water in which she stood was red.</p><p>Amidst the swirling sands beneath the waves were discarded automatic weapons.  The odd bit of entrail amidst the crimson foam.  Here and there a rent and severed body part.</p><p>Three APCs full of soldiers arrived at the Villa Sammartino before the Birds of Prey that evening.</p><p>And Bluebird was now standing in what was left of them.</p><p>
  <em>Jesus, I had that water in my mouth…</em>
</p><p>This was merely the first thing she noticed.  </p><p>The second thing that she noticed was how… <em>weird </em>everything looked.</p><p>But Bluebird couldn’t reckon with the exact, specific way in which everything looked weird when she was confronted with the third thing she noticed.</p><p>Something large and hulking and humanoid had lifted a sopping wet Black Canary from the surf by her throat.  She couldn’t let off her Canary Cry, and her face was turning red.  Her blue eyes were bulging out of her head.</p><p>As Bluebird yanked one of her taser pistols out of her jacket, her eyes cleared well enough to see what--or who--was holding her fellow Bord hostage.</p><p>It was Crazy Jane.</p><p>Rather it was what Crazy Jane would look like if her skin, her long black skirt, and her Philadelphia Flyers t-shirt was stretched over the skeleton and musculature of a professional wrestler.</p><p>And she was bald to boot.</p><p>“Jane,” Bluebird said, “you want to put my friend down right now.”</p><p>“Do I fucking look like Jane to you?” the bald woman asked.  “I’m Hammerhead.”</p><p>“Okay,” Bluebird said.  “Still doesn’t change the fact I will ruin your day if you don’t put my friend down.  See what I got in my hand?”</p><p>“I don’t think you’re gonna be doin’ anything, babe.”</p><p>It was the voice of Bluebird’s girlfriend coming up behind her.  She could hear Jinny Hex sloshing up next to her, emptying the bloody ocean water out of her cowboy hat.</p><p>“I am gonna zap this Frankenstein’s Monster over here if she doesn’t put Black Canary down,” Bluebird said.</p><p>“Naw, y’ain’t.”</p><p>“Wanna tell me why?”</p><p>“‘Cause you’re holdin’ an electric pistol while we’re all standin’ in water.”</p><p>
  <em>“Fuck…”</em>
</p><p>While Bluebird re-holstered her pistol, this Hammerhead person just… dropped Black Canary.  She landed in the water with a sploosh, and started coughing.</p><p>“You’re Black Canary?” Hammerhead asked.</p><p>Still coughing and holding her throat, still turning back to her normal skin tone, Black Canary nodded.</p><p>“Huh,” Hammerhead said.  “I’m a, uh… I’m a fan.”</p><p>Black Canary’s voice came out in a croak.  “I couldn’t tell.”</p><p>Hammerhead bent over and reached out her hand.  Black Canary took it and lifted herself to her feet.</p><p>“You came here for Crazy Jane?” Hammerhead asked.</p><p>“We did,” said Bluebird.  </p><p>“I’m not fucking talking to you.”</p><p>“We did,” said Black Canary.  “The Birds of Prey went to Italy on the say-so of Robotman, who said that Crazy Jane’s Doom Patrol communicator went off a couple of days ago.”</p><p>“That’s fucking impossible,” Hammerhead said.</p><p>“Yet here we are,” said Jinny Hex in reply.</p><p>Hammerhead sighed, and scratched her bald scalp.  “Alright.  Let’s get down to the fucking bottom of this.  Follow me.”</p><p>She turned and walked up the beach.  Separated from the surprise and the tension, Bluebird saw that the beach upon which the four women stood was the outskirts of a small island.</p><p>There was a small strip of palm trees on the perimeter of the island.  Within there were tight combs of Mediterranean housing, jammed against each other.  The streets and sidewalks must have been narrow as Hell.</p><p>The island itself, Bluebird noticed, was ensconced in its own sphere of sunlight.  All the more odd, then, that she noticed no actual sun in the sky from which this light would emanate.  And beyond that sphere of blue was the same black that had devoured them in the destroyed hedge maze of the villa Sammartino.</p><p>And everything, from the sky, to the water at her feet, to the trees off in the distance warped and bent in the same stringy familiar way.  Like…</p><p>...like…</p><p>“Brushstrokes,” Bluebird said to herself.</p><p>She wasn’t sure how, but Bluebird and the rest of the Birds of Prey were trapped in a massive, living painting.</p><p>Up ahead, Hammerhead said three words.</p><p>“Welcome to Masterpiece.”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>IX.<br/>
</em>
    <em>We Regret to Inform You…</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>GOTHAM CITY</b>
</p><p>Aaliyah and Carrie had stepped out of their Gotham Academy uniforms…</p><p>...and into their Batgirl and Robin outfits.</p><p>Batgirl took a second to look down at herself.  Minimal plating over a black body suit, built for stealth and speed instead for tanking shots.  And across her chest was the Bat Symbol, done in a shade of hot pink that Aaliyah Ramsay felt suited her.</p><p>Heaven forfend that they leave Mattie-Ann (and Little Jimmy) alone in the Clock Tower, Batgirl and Robin set off an S.O.S. of their very own.</p><p>They called Jason Todd and Cullen Row.</p><p>Jason served a paid position a Cassandra Wayne’s day driver (Miss Wayne being unable to drive a non-Batmobile car herself).  A former deceased Robin who had been reconstructed from Fifth Dimensional energy, he found himself as a thrall to two separate Greek Goddesses bent on the destruction of the Multiverse.  When all else failed, a young woman named Cassandra Cain, lacking at the time most of the faculty to speak, used her words to bring him back from the brink of oblivion itself.  A feat for which Jason himself was genuinely surprised… and deeply grateful.</p><p>Cullen Row was wise-ass brother to Harper, loving uncle to Mattie-Ann, butler to Bruce and Selina Wayne, and boyfriend to Jason.  Bruce of Selina were in Aruba, doing whatever two people who were richer than Jesus and no less than seven of the Apostles did in Aruba</p><p>The esteemed Mister Row was off in the corner of the Clock Tower’s top floor living area while Batgirl and Robin spoke to Jason.</p><p>“What do we got?” Jason asked.</p><p>“A question,” said Batgirl.</p><p>“What do we got?”</p><p>“We need--”</p><p>“What.  Do.  We.  Got?”</p><p>Robin sighed.  “S.O.S.  Twenty-five minutes ago.  How the hell did you get here so fast?”</p><p>“I’m an aggressive driver,” Jason said.  “Cass pays me for something.  An S.O.S?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Robin said.</p><p>“And you answered it.”  It wasn’t a question.</p><p>“Yeah,” Robin said.</p><p>“You know how Justice League protocol works, right?” Jason asked.  “How Oracle set it up?  You answer it, no one else can.  Some superhero’s in danger, and they get the sidekick brigade.”</p><p>“Jason,” Batgirl said.</p><p>“Just pass it off to someone else,” Jason said.  “You can do that.  Just…”</p><p>“Jason,” Batgirl said again.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>Batgirl felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.  She looked at Robin, who didn’t need to be told what to do.</p><p>Robin reached into a compartment of her utility belt, and removed a folded piece of paper, which she then handed to Jason.</p><p>Jason opened it, and promptly turned white.</p><p>“Oh, fuck…”</p><p>The piece of paper was what Aaliyah had printed from Oracle’s computer.  The sum and substance of the S.O.S. sent by Zinda <em>“Lady Blackhawk” </em>Blake from the <em>Aerie Three </em>in the skies above Italy.</p><p>Oracle’s status was unknown.  And Black Canary, Jinny Hex, and Bluebird had flatlined.</p><p>Jason handed the paper back to Robin, who crumpled it up in her green gloves.  Jason loosened the collar of his white dress shirt.</p><p>Cullen seemed to sense a disturbance in the force.  He broke off from his genial conversation with Mattie-Ann, tugged on the cuffs of his black suit jacket, and turned to Jason.</p><p>“Hey babe,” he said from across the room.</p><p>Jason practically jumped, as though his boyfriend’s words were a spider that had crawled across his foot in the middle of the night, waking him.</p><p>“Y--uh, yeah?”</p><p>“You okay?”</p><p>“I’m, uhh,” Jason said, shaking his head.  “I don’t think the tapas agreed with me.”</p><p>“It was your idea,” Cullen said.  <em>“You </em>were the one who went for the cold tapas.”</p><p>To which Mattie-Ann, who had been listening in, clutched at her chest with authentic shock.</p><p>“You ate cold tapas?”</p><p>“I did,” Jason said.</p><p>“In Gotham City?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Do you realize what you’ve done?”</p><p>“I do now.”</p><p>Cullen smiled, put his hand on his niece’s shoulder.</p><p>“Well, we’ll rustle up some ginger ale somewhere in this dungeon for your stomach,” Cullen said.  “Babs still drinks the stuff, right?”</p><p>“Last time I checked.”</p><p>Cullen smiled, winked, and turned back to Mattie-Anne.</p><p>Jason turned back to Batgirl and Robin, before burying his face in his right hand.</p><p>“For all I know,” Batgirl said, “for all <em>we </em>know… this is an equipment failure.  I don’t want to tell Cullen his sister is dead, and I really don’t want to tell Mattie-Ann her mom died.  Not without further investigation.”</p><p>“We send this to someone else,” Robin said, “there’s no telling who gets their hands on it, or who says what to whom.  Hearing it from us is bad enough, no one wants them to see it on CNN.  Batgirl and I need to be the ones who look this over.  Just a, uh…”</p><p>“A cursory glance,” Batgirl said.</p><p>“Thank you,” said Robin.  “A cursory glance.  If it really is this bad, we’ll send the S.O.S. to someone else, and we’ll tell Cullen and Mattie-Ann.”</p><p>“The three of us,” Jason said.</p><p>“Whatever you say,” said Robin.  “But that still doesn’t change the fact that we need a way to get to Italy extraordinarily fast.”</p><p>Jason blinked.  “Don’t you know Superboy and Supergirl?  Can’t they fly you over there?”</p><p>“It’ll take too long,” Batgirl said.</p><p>Jon Lane-Kent had actually flown over the fields of Hamilton County outside Metropolis with Aaliyah Ramsay in his arms.  Batgirl was as certain that this would be the single most transcendent moment in her life as any sixteen-year-old could be about the boy she liked at that moment.</p><p>Jason absent-mindedly nodded at this information.</p><p>“We can’t get a teleportation or a boom tube out there,” Robin said.  “Not without people getting this information that we don’t want getting it.  Which… is why…”</p><p>“You want to know if I have a way to get there?” Jason asked.</p><p>“Robins know shit,” said Batgirl.</p><p>“Except this one, apparently.”</p><p>Batgirl felt the shift in The Force.  Heard Robin’s lower lip curl beneath her upper teeth in that telltale genesis of a word beginning with F.  Batgirl popped a black-gloved hand over Robin’s mouth before she made the whole situation irretrievable.</p><p>Robin’s forehead flashed red before it went back to her natural pasty pale, and Batgirl took her hand away.</p><p>“Do you know what you’re asking?” Jason asked.</p><p>Batgirl put her hands up.  “I know it’s--”</p><p>“No,” Jason said, taking a step toward Robin.  “You’re a Robin looking to go off-book, asking advice from a Robin who <em>died </em>going off-book.  Carrie.  You little shit.  Do you know what you’re asking?”</p><p>At the very least, Robin had the sense to look at the floor.</p><p>Jason folded his arms.  He huffed.  Then huffed again, before maintaining a healthy silence for a moment.</p><p>“However,” Jason said when he elected to resume his speaking duties.  “That being said…”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>X.<br/>
</em>
    <em>High Daring and Low Cuisine</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>Barbara Gordon used her pinky to nudge some of the rapidly cooling, wholly disgusting goulash onto a piece of flat pita bread.</p><p>Her red fruit whatever drink was half way done.  The vanilla wafers were gone, as was the applesauce.</p><p>She was slowing down.  A replay of the old days when she was little, and she got down to those last two pieces of broccoli on her plate, after which she just shut down completely.  Those last two soggy, gross green plants became insurmountable.  Too much to choke down, no matter the liberal application of salt or melted Velveeta.  Unable to be traversed by land, seas, or air, let alone by teeth.</p><p>This was different though.</p><p>The meal at present was not administered by the stern-yet-benevolent James Gordon, the man from whom Barbara had inherited her unbending sense of right and wrong.</p><p>It was administered by Lady Shiva, who would kill Barbara without blinking at the first sign of loginess or lethargy.</p><p>Her rapidly diminishing meal signified the end of the life of Barbara Joan Gordon.</p><p>There was nothing that she could do to stop Shiva.  Her bag of tricks were wholly incompatible with Shiva’s bag of tricks.  Oracle, for her twenty years of service to the safety and well-being of humankind, offered as much resistance to the former Sandra Wu-San as would a membrane of soggy tissue paper to a pissed-off rhino.</p><p>But the thing that Barbara was thinking about, the thing that skittered access the inside of her skull like an insidious ad jingle…</p><p>...was that she missed Cass.</p><p>Her distance from Cassandra was due to anger, yes, but it was also due to procrastination.  There was just… time to get this right.</p><p>And now time had run out.</p><p>Barbara would not leave Italy alive.  She would not see her dad again.  Never see the inside of the Clock Tower.  Never get another pizza at D’Artganan’s in Park Row.</p><p>And she would never introduce her infant son to his big sister.</p><p>“Are you finished with your meal?” Lady Shiva asked over her own empty tray.  “Are you finally going to tell me about Cassandra, or are you going to continue shoveling substandard food into your maw with as little enthusiasm you can muster?”</p><p>It was only now that Barbara could bring herself to look in Lady Shiva’s eyes.  She had a smirk in place and a twinkle in her eye.  It was condescension incarnate.  They weren’t even the same species anymore.</p><p>And, well, Babs Gordon was gonna die tonight anyway.</p><p>“I think I’m just gonna sit here and watch the look on your face when you realize you’re not getting what you want,” Barbara said.  “Because she’s my daughter, not yours.  She doesn’t owe you a damn thing, and neither do I.”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XI.</em>
    <em><br/>
</em>
    <em>Battle Fatigue</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>MASTERPIECE</b>
</p><p>Hammerhead led Bluebird, Black Canary, and Jinny Hex through the ring of woods and onto the white stone streets of the painted island town of Masterpiece.</p><p>Every resident of Masterpiece wore the same clothes, had the same black hair, had the same brown skin, had the same dark eyes.  But many of them were bigger or smaller, thinner or thicker.  Some had unnatural alterations, like glowing blue veins, or streaks of silver paint across their mouths.  As though they were specific alterations to a prototype.</p><p>And they answered to names like Driller Bill and Silvertongue and Flit.  Liza Radley and Mama Pentecost and Sin Eater.  Suzie Fugue and Flaming Katy and Sex Bomb.  And an excitable one in pigtails named Baby Doll, with the boundless energy and mush-mouthed demeanor a six-year-old… or at least the stereotypical version of a six-year-old that plagued Harper Row’s nightmares, before she herself gave birth to the baby girl that became the most chill six-year-old in history.   </p><p>Bluebird knew that these were the other personalities in the head of Kay <em>“Crazy Jane”</em> Challis.  Through some quirk or as-yet-unexplained phenomenon, the personalities located in her brain managed to separate within this painted world, and invite others in with them.  Weirdly, the eyes of every single one of them seemed to linger on Black Canary.  Not like they were eyeing her up sexually (although there was one named Scarlet Harlot that very much was).  No, it was the look that parents of the deceased give a presiding politician at a military funeral.  And as the former Deputy Mayor of Gotham City, Harper Row had been the presiding politician at more than a couple.  If you were a good politician, these looks were grateful almost to the point of tears, and the looks they were giving Dinah Lance-Choi were such a thing.</p><p>Just one thing, though…</p><p>All the intel that Bluebird had read had said that Crazy Jane had sixty-four personalities.</p><p>Just on this short walk, however, Bluebird had counted seventy.</p><p>In front of her, Jinny Hex stumbled, leaning her shoulder on the wall of a building.  This caused the entire four person party to have to halt.</p><p>Bluebird put her hand on Jinny’s shoulder.  “You okay, babe?”</p><p>Jinny, who had her drying socks on the shoulder of her beige duster, who had both her cowboy boots in one hand and her still-damp cowboy hat in the other, had a sheen of moisture on her forehead that had nothing to do with the painted ocean form which she had emerged minutes before.</p><p>“The sky’s makin’ me nauseous,” Jinny said.</p><p>Bluebird looked up.  The blue brushstrokes of the sky writhed and undulated in a way that the brushstrokes that comprised the solid objects in Masterpiece did not.</p><p>“Yeah,” Bluebird said, “that’ll do it.”</p><p>Jinny spat on the white pavement.</p><p>“Just, uh… Just put your cowboy hat on,” Bluebird said.  “Keep it out of your eyes.”</p><p>Jinny nodded.  Bluebird kissed her on the forehead.  After a few seconds, Jinny put the soggy cowboy hat back on her head, and they continued their walk.</p><p>They came upon a building shaped like a cone on Masterpiece’s eastern edge.  From within came guitar music, and standing out front was another alter. This one seemed a little shorter than the average.  Her black hair was in a ponytail.  Her Philadelphia Flyers shirt was tucked into her skirt.  And atop her head was a black and gray tweed newsboy hat.</p><p>Her eyes went wide.  They pointed at Hammerhead.</p><p>“People!” this alter chirped in a wildly unexpected British accent.  “Th--There are people here!”</p><p>“You don’t think I fucking know that?” Hammerhead asked.  “I can see them, Penny.  They’re here to see Jane.”</p><p>This “Penny” was the sort that blanched at profanity.  Those wide-eyes of here levelled at Black Canary the same way everyone else’s did</p><p>“Please excuse me my lack of manners,” Penny said, extending her hand to Dinah. “My name is Penny Farthing, miss, and it is a pleasure to meet you.”</p><p>Black Canary smiled, shook her hand, and said “Missus.”</p><p>“I beg your pardon?”</p><p>“Missus,” Black Canary said.  “I’m married.”</p><p>Penny Farthing blanched even further.  She looked like she’d been given a diagnosis for a horrible disease that gave her forty-five seconds to live.</p><p>“Oh, dear…”</p><p>“It’s okay.”</p><p>“Oh, <em>dear…”</em></p><p>“It’s <em>okay,” </em>Black Canary said.  “Just something for future reference.”</p><p>“We done?” Hammerhead asked.  “‘Cause I got fucking bodies to bury.”</p><p>Bluebird reckoned that Penny Farthing got any paler, she’d be transparent.</p><p>“Yes,” Penny Farthing said, collecting her composure, visibly grateful to move on from her faux-pas.  “Thank you, Hammerhead.”</p><p>Hammerhead sighed before she walked off, saying goodbye to no one.</p><p>“Now then,” said Penny Farthing.</p><p>“We are here to see Jane, though,” Jinny said.</p><p>“Of course,” said Penny.  She opened the door behind her, bowed, and said “After you.”</p><p>Inside the conical building was a fully stocked bar and a few tables.</p><p>Sitting at one of the tables, one of the alters was playing an acoustic guitar made of paint, her hair hiding her face as she looked down.  Bluebird didn’t know the song, but she thought it sounded pretty.</p><p>“Miss Jane?” Penny Farthing asked.</p><p>The alter looked up.  She looked like the median between all the others.  Bluebird wondered how that worked.</p><p>Because this was Crazy Jane.</p><p>And it looked like she hadn’t aged a day in the last fifteen years.  Or at least since the picture in her file had been taken.</p><p>Jane looked at the assembled congregation with an open mouth.  She set the guitar she had been playing down, and judging from the light <em>thunk! </em>Noise, Bluebird could tell that this guitar made of paint was still, somehow, simultaneously… made of wood.</p><p>“What the fuck is this?” Crazy Jane asked.</p><p>“Does everyone in this town talk like my Great Aunt Phyllis?” Bluebird asked.</p><p>“Y’all don’t seem to know words that don’t begin with the letter F,” Jinny said, before pointing at Penny Farthing.  “‘Cept for this’n right here.”</p><p>“They emerged on the beach,” Penny said.  “Same as everyone and everything else who ends up here in Masterpiece.  They were… <em>intercepted</em>… by Hammerhead.”</p><p>“Of course,” Jane said.  “Thanks, Penny.”</p><p>“Thank you, Miss,” Penny said, before she made her farewells and then her exit.</p><p>“What the hell were you three doing snooping around the Villa Sammartino?” Crazy Jane asked.</p><p>“That the operative question here?” Black Canary asked.  “Seriously?  Not where the fuck are we and what the fuck is this?”</p><p>Bluebird felt herself flinch.  Dinah didn’t whip out the F bomb for just anything.</p><p>“No,” Jane said.  “It isn’t.  Why were you at the Villa Sammartino?”</p><p>Bluebird tilted her head.  It seemed that Crazy Jane herself was the only one of the alters in Masterpiece that didn’t instantly see Black Canary as a figure of idolatry.</p><p>“‘Cause you were sent for,” Jinny (who had made her way behind the bar) said.  “Robotman went to Nightwing, and Nightwing came to us.”</p><p>The scowl that had settled over Jane’s face rippled at the mention of the name.</p><p>“Cliff?” she asked, plainly apparent that she was fighting off a smile.  “Cliff just decided to look for me after… How long have I been here?”</p><p>“Fifteen years,” said Bluebird.</p><p>“Jesus,” said Jane, to herself as much as anyone else.  “So Cliff just got a wild hair up his metal ass and decided to look for me?”</p><p>“No, actually,” said Bluebird.  “Robotman said your old Doom Patrol communicator went off a couple of days ago.  That’s what made him go to Nightwing.”</p><p>Jane just blinked.  After a few seconds, her face curdled, and she finally yelled out:</p><p>“FLIT!”</p><p>A nanosecond later, another of the alters just teleported into the room.  She had crispy eighties hair and pink lip gloss, and she was chewing gum.</p><p>“Find Baby Doll,” Jane said.  “Now.”</p><p>Flit gave Jane a pair of finger-guns, before she departed as suddenly as she came.</p><p>“And now we wait,” Jane said.  “Though for my money, Baby Doll is at the pet cemetery.”</p><p>“Y’all have a pet cemetery?” Jinny asked.  “The pets made-a paint, too?”</p><p>“The paint tendrils pick a lot of stuff around the villa,” Jane said.  “Sometimes its people…”</p><p>“Yeah, about that,” Bluebird said.  “Some mercenaries showed up before we did and wound up here.  Your bestie Hammerhead tore them to shreds.”</p><p>“She’s not my bestie,” Jane said.  “And good for her.”</p><p>“You think that’s superhero behavior?”</p><p>“Anyone around here look like a fucking superhero to you?”</p><p>“Point taken.”</p><p>“But most of the time,” Jane said, “it’s just dogs and cats.  We keep them because we like dogs and cats.”</p><p>“What do you feed them?” Bluebird asked.</p><p>“Cat and dog food.”</p><p>“And where do you get it?”</p><p>From the bar: “Same place she got this hooch!”</p><p>Everyone in the room swiveled their heads toward Jinny Hex, who had a clear bottle of brown paint that was supposed to be brown booze.</p><p>“This here’s Sailor Jerry,” Jinny said, impressed.  “I mean, it’s paint… but it’s Sailor Jerry!”</p><p>Bluebird looked back at Crazy Jane.  “You gonna tell me what’s going on, now?”</p><p>Jane sighed.</p><p>“Fifteen years ago,” Jane said, “the Doom Patrol fought Sportsmaster for a Dayton Device.  The Device started malfunctioning.  It was going to explode.  At the time, I was not the alter in charge.”</p><p>“Who was?” Black Canary asked.</p><p>“The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter,” said Jane.</p><p>“And her power is?” asked Bluebird?</p><p>“She’s a painter,” Jane said in reply.  “Whatever she paints can be… interacted with.”</p><p>“And drank, apparently,” said Jinny.</p><p>“The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter runs at Sportsmaster with an open tube of black paint in her hand.  Next thing any of us know is that we’re standing on this infinite black horizon with a sky larger than the universe the same color of the wall in the cellar of the Villa Sammartino.  Ever since then, for fifteen years, apparently, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter has been building this paradise, this fucking masterpiece stone by stone, ocean wave by ocean wave.”</p><p>“So… are you trapped here?” Bluebird asked. </p><p>“Nope,” Jane said.  “We can go whenever you want to.  And when Baby Doll explains herself--because I know she’s behind this--I’m kicking the three of you out.”</p><p>“What happened to the Dayton Device?”</p><p>“It shorted out instead of exploding.  It was destroyed.  We chucked it down a well.”</p><p>“And Sportsmaster?”</p><p>“Did you know we have a people cemetery, too?”</p><p>Bluebird rolled her eyes.</p><p>As she did, Flit reappeared again, with another, smaller alter.  One with pigtails.</p><p>Baby Doll.</p><p>“GET OFF ME!” she yelled, as she wrenched herself from Flit’s grip.</p><p>“Thank you, Flit,” said Jane.</p><p>Flit wordlessly gave the finger guns yet again, before she disappeared to parts unknown.</p><p>As Baby Doll rubbed her wrists, Jane walked towards her.</p><p>“Your pockets,” Jane said.  “Turn ‘em out.”</p><p>“Youuuuu… wanna see my seashell collection?” Baby Doll asked.</p><p>Bluebird knew someone who wasn’t good with kids.  And Crazy Jane screamed it without making a sound.</p><p>She stepped between the two alters, and said “We sure do.”</p><p>Baby Doll blushed, smiled, and emptied out her pockets.  Almost a dozen seashells of different colors fell to the wooden floor with thunking noises unbecoming things made of paint…</p><p>...and a small black disc that wasn’t made of paint.  It looked like something that had been crafted in the sixties with modern tech.  And had two red lights that were blinking.</p><p>“Where’d you get that?” Jane asked.</p><p>Baby Doll shrugged and made a noise, free of consonants, that was a vague approximation on the words <em>“I don’t know.”</em></p><p>“Stuff gets places,” Bluebird said, before smiling at Baby Doll and saying “I have a daughter myself.”</p><p>Baby Doll smiled.  “You’re nice.”</p><p>“I try.”</p><p>“Can I go?”</p><p>“You can.”</p><p>Baby Doll smiled wider.  She knelt down, collected her seashells, and skipped out the door.</p><p>Bluebird turned to Jane.  “Sound like a solved mystery to you?”</p><p>Jane nodded.</p><p>“Can we go?”</p><p>“Please do.”</p><p>“You coming with us?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“And what are we supposed to tell your friend Cliff Steele when he asks why you won’t come back when we went through so much shit to find you?”</p><p>Jane opened her mouth with an angry glint in her eyes…</p><p>...and was cut off by Black Canary.</p><p>“I know why you won’t come with us,” said Black Canary.</p><p>Bluebird noticed that that angry glint in Jane’s eye turned into a vague approximation of <em>fear?</em></p><p>“You vanished here fifteen years ago,” Black Canary said.  “Seeing you up close, though?  Makes me remember what happened <em>sixteen </em>years ago.”</p><p>Black Canary took a step forward.  Crazy Jane took one back without apparently meaning to.  And while Jane had fear in her eyes, there was nothing but sympathy in the eyes of Dinah Lance-Choi.</p><p>“You have a story to tell, Jane, you can tell it in front of these two.  They were there with us.”</p><p>“We were where with you?” Jinny asked.  “What’s goin’ on here?”</p><p>Black Canary looked on the petrification that had invaded the body of Crazy Jane with the total kindness that Babs had said she was known for, and sighed.</p><p>She turned to Bluebird and Jinny.</p><p>“Jane and I fought alongside each other at the Battle of Founders Island,” Black Canary said.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Part Four (of Six)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="u"> <em>XII.<br/></em> <em>The Battle of Founders Island</em> </span>
</p><p>
  <b>GOTHAM CITY - SIXTEEN YEARS AGO</b>
</p><p>Crazy Jane’s ears were ringing.</p><p>What had begun as an all-hands-on-deck foray by a near-totality of the superhero community to punch up rock monsters in Gotham City had turned into either a bloody shitshow or a shitty bloodshow, Jane didn’t know which.</p><p>It started as a blast.  Silvertongue came up from the Underground to the surface, talking shit and having that talked shit form metal words to destroy this <em>“Army of Nemesis,” </em>whatever the hell <em>that </em>was.</p><p>It got bad when Aquaman, one of the planet’s heavy hitters, both politically and and in terms of actually punching things, got stabbed through the chest.  The king of Atlantis was dead.  Jane had never actually met him, even though they’d both been at Bruce Wayne’s wedding to Selina Kyle, but there was a twinge in Jane’s heart all the same.  All the more to compliment the air of unreality.  Aquaman.  <em>Dead. </em> It <em>can’t </em>be.</p><p>No, things truly went pear-shaped with the death of Miss Martian, another attendee of the Batman/Catwoman nuptials, and also unacquainted with Crazy Jane.  She was the niece or cousin or whatever of Martian Manhunter.  The same Martian Manhunter who had everyone on Founders Island on a telepathic link so they could communicate.  The guy keeping them all in touch had a breakdown in grief.  A grief they all had no choice but to feel.  It caused anxiety and confusion, and even more capes died.</p><p>In the few minutes that elapsed from the time Martian Manhunter forced himself to cut the telepathic link to the time Nightwing established rudimentary and conventional comms, Crazy Jane had seen the rapidly multiplying Soldiers of Nemesis swarm and slaughter Garfield <em>“Beast Boy” </em>Logan.  The poor guy died screaming.  She had been standing next to Rita <em>“Elasti-Woman” </em>Farr when it happened and Rita, who had looked upon poor Logan as a son, didn’t even scream.  But the look in her eyes was… horrifying.  All empty and dead, as though someone had reached inside her chest and removed parts.</p><p>In the midst of the starbolts and the Canary Cries, the gunshots and the screaming, the explosions and the sundering buildings, Jane had been separated from the rest of the Doom Patrol.  The last she saw, Negative Man had been carrying Robotman’s severed head beneath his arm.  Poor ol’ Cliff was gonna need repairs.</p><p>Jane closed her eyes as she leaned against a destroyed Burger King, and tried to reach…</p><hr/><p>
  <em>...into The Underground.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Deep within.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The mental structure within the mind of The One Who Had Once Been Kay Challis.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Where all the others dwelt.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Kay’s father visited upon her a great and vile evil.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And from that evil, The Underground bloomed, and all its denizens rose to defend The Girl.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They had powers.  Bloody strength.  Will over lightning and fire.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But Crazy Jane was the one that brought all of the others to heel.  The one to whom almost all requests were granted, from those as tempestuous as Mama Pentecost to those as obstinate as Hammerhead.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But there were no takers right now.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The stench of blood was too high.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Jane was on her own.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Jane opened her eyes, and silently, fluidly, cursed sixty-two of the other sixty-three alters within her skull.</p><p>Her bootfalls ran counter to the beat of explosions and shattering concrete as she found an alley.</p><p>In between a bank and a CC Jitters, Jane found a small assortment of superheroes attempting to regroup.</p><p>She found a small bloom of hope when she saw that Black Canary and Huntress were near the open mouth of the alley, looking out into the street at the carnage, apparently formulating a plan.  </p><p>There were three other people in the alley.  Jane would have preferred heavy hitters like Black Canary and Huntress.</p><p>Who she got were Bumblebee, Argent, and Frankenstein.</p><p>Karen <em>“Bumblebee” </em>Beecher was a research engineer who loved her superhero boyfriend Mal <em>“Herald” </em>Duncan so much that she picked a fight with the Teen Titans that she threw, so that Mal would look good enough for the Titans (who, at the time, were headed by Dick Grayson when he was still Robin) to sign.  Which they did.  They also signed Karen, as the bee-themed mechanical suit that she wore was incredibly impressive, and allowed her flight and no small measure of augmented strength.</p><p>Toni <em>“Argent” </em>Monetti billed herself as <em>“The First Guidette Superhero” </em>on her Twitter bio.  The teenage daughter of a mafia-connected New Jersey Senator and a woman of the H’San Natall race of aliens, she didn’t know she was extraterrestrial in origin until she hit puberty and her skin started turning silver.  She could also make constructs and forcefields out of silver plasma that came from her hands.  The eighteen-year-old Monetti was, at the time, a member of Teen Titans East, alongside Crush, Aqualad, and Static.</p><p>And Frankenstein was… well, he was Frankenstein.  It turned out that the young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s debut work in 1818 was less the first science-fiction novel, and more the kind of fiction-laced journalism that Truman Capote would <em>“officially” </em>pioneer one-hundred-fifty-eight years later with <em>In Cold Blood. </em>  Nevertheless, there really was a construct made of reanimated tissue crafted by Victor Frankenstein that was lost in the North Pole in the late 1700s.  That construct just made it out of the ice, and eventually found itself in America.  Of the three ancillary superheroes in that alley, apart from Black Canary and Huntress, it was Frankenstein that was the most prominent within the community.  He was a senior agent in SHADE, which was the United States government’s paranormal law enforcement wing.</p><p>It should be noted that all of his government IDs said <em>“Frankenstein,” </em>for this is what he named himself.  Even he got tired of the slow waves of pedantic bullshit that crashed against his feet whenever someone told him <em>“I thought Frankenstein was the name of the scientist.” </em></p><p>"Worried about Babs?" Huntress asked.</p><p>"Yep," said Black Canary.<br/><br/>"She's doing a thing with Stinky-Tits at Amusement Mile, so she' gonna be fine.  You worried about Ryan?"<br/><br/>"Yep."</p><p>"Ryan is The Atom.  He can shrink and embiggen and take care of himself.  You worried about Ollie?"<br/><br/>Black Canary wavered her right hand, and said <em>"Ehhhhhhhhh."</em></p><p>One chuckle later, Huntress said "Well, good.  It speaks to your maturity.  You're lucky.  I don't have people to worry about like that."</p><p>“Yeah, you do,” Black Canary said.  Almost reflexively.</p><p>Even in a darkened alley beneath a dark sky (that was beginning to spit out snow), Jane could see Huntress grow pale.</p><p>“I… beg your pardon?”</p><p>“Oracle told me,” Black Canary said.  “I hope you and Eel have very Catholic, very stretchy babies.”</p><p>Jane could hear the smile in her voice when she said it.</p><p>Huntress clutched the crucifix hanging around her neck, and started groaning through clenched teeth.  “I will put that ginger skank back in her wheelchair…”</p><p>Bumblebee, who was standing on the right side of the alley next to Argent, said “Please… do we have anything else to talk about besides boys?”</p><p>“It’s called breaking the tension,” said Huntress.</p><p>“But you might be making Frankenstein uncomfortable!”</p><p><b>“Yes,”</b> Frankenstein said on the opposite side of the alley. <b> “This conversation makes me </b><b><em>quite</em> </b><b>uncomfortable.”</b></p><p>Argent just blinked at him.  “Talkin’ about boys makes you uncomfortable?”</p><p><b>“No,”</b> said Frankenstein, his voice akin to the sound of a braying moose in a sewer.  <b>“The talk of Catholicism.”</b></p><p>The massive undead superhero looked at Huntress and said <b>“I am divorced.  I have, sadly, broken one of the sacraments.”</b></p><p>From Jane’s vantage point, Frankenstein appeared to be hitting the seven-foot-tall mark.  He looked like he stepped out of one of the old Frankenstein movies with Boris Karloff, save for how ripped he was with two intimidating green guns sticking out of a sleeveless long coat.  He had the flat head, he had the green skin.  But he had the bolts in his temples, though, not in his neck.</p><p>Huntress beheld this amalgamation of humanity and asked “Something <em>married you?”</em></p><p>Jane had to laugh.  Or at least giggle.</p><p>And that’s how she got introduced.</p><p>“Hey,” Bumblebee said.  “You civilian?”</p><p>“No,” Jane said.  “Doom Patrol.”</p><p>“Which one?” asked Black Canary.</p><p>“Crazy Jane.”</p><p>“The one with--”</p><p>“With the multiple personalities,” Jane said.  “Yeah.”</p><p>She almost blanched when she said it.  It was Black Canary.  She couldn’t speak for all of the others in The underground, but Jane herself was a fan.</p><p>“Hey,” Argent said  “Is it true that one of your teammates was the only one Harley Quinn would dance with at Batman and Catwoman’s wedding?”</p><p>“Coagula,” Jane said.  “And yes.”</p><p>“How’d she pull that one off?”</p><p>“We… are embarrassing… <em>Frankenstein,” </em>said Bumblebee.</p><p><b>“I am not, however, homophobic,”</b> Frankenstein said.  <b>“Please feel free to talk about women however you wish.”</b></p><p>Bumblebee just pinched the bridge of her nose.</p><p>“May as well be civilian, though,” Jane said.  “I can’t access any of the alters within The Underground.”</p><p>“The… The what?” Huntress asked.</p><p>“It’s hard to explain,” Jane said.  “Long story short, there’s a place in my head where all the other personalities are.  All sixty-three of them are giving me the cold shoulder.  They’re terrified.  What the hell <em>are </em>these things?”</p><p>“The Army of Nemesis,” Black Canary said.  “Henchmen of a pissed off Greek Goddess.  You can’t kill them.  You pulverize one, it just remakes itself out of the surroundings.  And every time one of us dies, they use the soul to make another one of themselves.”</p><p><b>“Most like a convoluted zombie plague,”</b> said Frankenstein. <b> “If one of us dies, their number goes up by that one.”</b></p><p>“And they got magic out the ass,” said Huntress.  “Nothing Zatanna can do to them so much makes a dent.  And those arm spikes of theirs have left Supergirl with a few cuts.”</p><p>“Jesus.”</p><p>“Is with us and loves us.”</p><p>Bumblebee looked at Black Canary and asked “Is there something we can do for her?”</p><p>“There is,” Black Canary said as she got a communicator out of her black leather jacket.  “We have a few speedsters running perimeter around Founders Island, making sure these things don’t spread to the rest of the city and start cutting up more civvies.  I can call one of them, and see if they can’t get you to a safe z--”</p><p>The brick wall of the alley in between Bumblebee and Argent started to shift and shudder.</p><p>“Aw, shit,” said Argent.</p><p>The red dust and crumbling chunks from the bricks started quickly sauntering down toward the pavement, forming footprints.. then feet… then…</p><p>“Bail!”  Black Canary yelled.  “BAIL!”</p><p>The five women and one reanimated monster ran out of the alley.  It was Crazy Jane, however, who ran farthest.  All the way to the other side of the street.</p><p>Five Soldiers of Nemesis staggered out of the alley, their stony faces bereft of feature, and the spikes possessing a sharpness that Jane found terrifying.</p><p>And the five superheroes went to meet them.</p><p>Huntress fired an explosive crossbow bolt into the forehead of one of them, obliterating it instantly.</p><p>Argent brought up a silver plasma shield <em>juuuuust </em>as a Solider swung wildly.</p><p>Bumblebee used the wings on her black and gold suit to hover a good nine feet in the air, before coming down on the Soldier coming for her like, well, a ton of bricks. Sending red dust into her afro puffs.</p><p>Frankenstein just brought his hands together, smashing the head of the Soldier he fought into detritus.</p><p>And as for Black Canary?  She could have used her Canary Cry to rend it to dust, but she used her bare hands and her power.</p><p>The whole fight was over in mere seconds.</p><p>Jane was impressed.  The Soldiers of Nemesis would apparently reform elsewhere, but they weren’t a problem now.</p><p>She tried to keep the smile off of her face as she lightly jogged up to them… an effort that would prove successful when she saw Bumblebee turn to her left and gasp.</p><p>“Oh, no…”</p><p>Bumblebee was looking at Argent, who was holding the right side of her pelvis, above the groin of her black bodysuit, with both hands.</p><p>She was raining red.</p><p>“I...I, uh…” Argent said before she dropped to her knees.</p><p>To Jane’s eternal shock, the first one to make it to Argent’s side was Jane herself.  She knelt down in the damp, dusty, slowly snow-covered street, and clamped both of her hands over Argent’s.</p><p>Jane knew.  She didn’t know much about how anatomy worked, but she knew where the femoral artery was, and Argent’s had been cut.</p><p>Argent didn’t have any big speeches or tearful goodbyes in her.  All she had… was seconds.</p><p>Her head fell to Jane’s shoulder.</p><p>“Wow,” Argent said.  “It’s… It’s kinda cold…”</p><p>Argent let in a deep breath.</p><p>She didn’t let it out.</p><p>Argent’s weight went limp against Jane’s body, and Jane didn’t take her hands away for fear of what would happen after.</p><p>It was Frankenstein who finally pulled Argent away from the kneeling Jane.  She saw Argent’s mouth hanging open, her pale blue eyes half shut.</p><p>Jane saw a single snowflake fall into Argent’s left eye.</p><p>And she did not blink it away.</p><p>Antonia <em>“Argent” </em>Monetti died in Gotham City at the age of eighteen, her face nestled in the shoulder of a certifiably insane woman’s green sweatshirt.  The First… and Final… Guidette Superhero, who never found out what Coagula said to Harley Quinn to get her to dance with her.</p><p>Frankenstein, with a gentleness that managed to surprise even the stunned Crazy Jane, lowered the deceased Argent to the pavement.</p><p><b>“You were too young to join the ranks of The Dead, child,”</b> said Frankenstein.  <b>“I can only hope that the pain was not too great.”</b></p><p>Jane thought Argent looked… young.  The fact of the matter was that each personality within the body of Kay Challis took turns with the actual physical aging.  She looked like she was in her early thirties, but the fact of the matter was that the physical vessel of Kay Challis was born in 1952.  She was pushing seventy.</p><p>And she had a hard time remembering when she herself looked as young as the now-dead Argent did now.</p><p>She looked down, and saw that her hands, her shirt, her skirt were awash in the late Argent’s blood.  The poor girl had emptied herself upon her.  Her stomach roiled and her head pounded.</p><p>There was a low rumble.  A howling cacophony.  Not from the air, or the earth, but…</p><hr/><p>
  <em>...The Underground.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The silhouette of The Girl in the open maw of the tunnels.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Red light behind her as The Underground ached and groaned.  The very bricks splitting.  Multiplying.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>New stations.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>New inhabitants.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>All screaming and clawing for identity and ability and power.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Sixty-Four were now The One-Hundred-Nine.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Everything was pain.  Even the air hurt.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Rippling out.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Out…</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Out…</em>
</p><hr/><p>Crazy Jane could not see Gotham City.  Could not hear the cold wind or the bullets or the Soldiers of Nemesis coming from the buildings.</p><p>There was screaming.</p><p><em>Her </em>screaming.</p><p>And it was all there was.</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u"> <em>XIII.<br/></em> <em>Getting Unlucky</em> </span>
</p><p>
  <b>MASTERPIECE - NOW</b>
</p><p>It felt… <em>weird… </em>for Crazy Jane to tell her story.</p><p>For the past fifteen years, in this painted island of Masterpiece, she hadn’t felt the need to talk to anyone.  There were no secrets she could keep, no conversations she could have that prove to be deep or revelatory.  There were one-hundred-nine aspects of the same being on this island.</p><p>Now there were three interlopers.  There was Jinny Hex, behind the bar rifling through the bottles of booze.  There was Bluebird, sitting at one of the tables.</p><p>And then there was Black Canary, just standing there in front of her.  With that… <em>look </em>on her face.</p><p>Jane was a fan of Dinah Lance, no question.  All one-hundred-nine residents of Masterpiece were.  </p><p>But she was an invader.  A foreign body.  A harmful agent.</p><p>And she had that <em>look </em>on her face.</p><p>The one that was full of pity.</p><p>“I was at Argent’s funeral,” Black Canary said.  “Everyone was.  Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman…”</p><p>“I wasn’t,” Jane said.</p><p>Black Canary just folded her arms, and looked away.</p><p>“So… when Argent died,” said Bluebird.</p><p>Jane looked at her.</p><p>“You got.. Like… more personalities?”</p><p>“Alters,” said Jane.  “Another forty-five.”</p><p>“Is that how it works?”</p><p>“It is with me,” Jane said.  “You done?”</p><p>Jane spared her glance for Black Canary and Jinny Hex as well.</p><p>“Are all of you done?”</p><p>None of them said anything.</p><p>“Good,” Jane said.  “Then you can get the fuck off my island.”</p><p>Canary, Bluebird, and Jinny shared brittle glances before looking back at Jane.</p><p>“You mean y’ain’t comin’ back with us?” Jinny asked.</p><p>“Nope,” said Jane.</p><p>“Mind if we ask why?” said Bluebird.</p><p>“I’m on a desert island where I don’t age,” Jane said.  “That a serious question?”</p><p>“Looks awful lonely,” said Jinny, “if’n ya don’t mind my sayin’.”</p><p>“There are a hundred-and-eight other people on this island.</p><p>“They’re a hundred-and-eight versions of you,” Black Canary said.  “That looks <em>incredibly </em>lonely.  You’ve been stewing in your own juices.  You need help.  Trapping yourself inside a painting for fifteen years is the opposite of healthy, no matter how pretty the painting is.  Not to mention, you’re gonna make us all look like assholes in front of Cliff Steele.”</p><p>Jane smiled at this.  “Of all people, Cliff would be the one to get it.”</p><p>At this point, Jane stood up and mustered all the authority she had in her body.  She was about to give Black Canary her marching orders.</p><p>“Go back to the beach you came out of,” Jane said.  “Swim back out to the black.  Keep going and you’ll find yourself in Italy…. And don’t come back.”</p><p>“Jane,” Black Canary said, “it doesn’t have to be this way.”</p><p>“When Kay Challis was born in the fifties,” Jane said, “her father did something terrible to her.  And that’s how I was born.  Me and sixty-two others.  The girl’s mind conjured us to protect her.  But because we have gifts, we were put into a freakshow and told to fight whatever bad guy came along.  Killer robot?  Talking gorilla?  Greek Goddess?  Didn’t matter.  We fought.  Because that was the job.”</p><p>Jane took another step toward Black Canary.  To her credit, she wasn’t looking away.</p><p>“Sixteen years ago, an eighteen year old girl dies on me.  Not near me, not in front of me, <em>literally on </em>me.  And I found this so traumatic that Kay Challis started spitting out forty-five more alters to cope.  Kay, and me, and Hammerhead, Silvertongue, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, all of us were dealt shitty cards in a game none of us want to play anymore.  But I know if I leave Masterpiece, I’ll get those cards again the next time Darkseid or Lex Luthor gets a wild hair up his ass and wants to share it with the world.  So I gotta ask, and I need you to be honest…”</p><p>Crazy Jane straightened out her Philadelphia Flyers shirt, put her hands in the pockets of her long black skirt, and asked:</p><p>“Do I look like a fucking superhero to you?”</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u"> <em>XIV.<br/></em> <em>Hey.  You.  You’re Finally Awake.</em> </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>Barbara Gordon once read in a book whose title she could not recall that the symbol of the United States should not be a bald eagle.</p><p>No, the symbol of the United States should be the crawfish.</p><p>For a bald eagle sitting on a railroad track, seeing a train coming toward them, would fly away to avoid getting crushed.</p><p>Whereas a crawfish sitting on a railroad track, seeing a train coming toward them, would put up its little claws and try to stop it.</p><p>Barbara, in the present moment, felt like the crawfish.</p><p>And Lady Shiva, to Barbara, held the expression of a caustic bystander looking at the crawfish putting its little claws up to stop the train.  Smirking at the adorability of the doomed fight.</p><p>But Barbara was going to go right on through.</p><p>“I’m more a mother to Cass that you have ever been or will ever be,” she said.</p><p>“I highly doubt that,” said Shiva.</p><p>“Oh, but I don’t,” Barbara said.  “You teach her how to read?  How to floss her teeth?  Tie a pair of shoes?  How to use a tampon?  Jesus, did you know Cass didn’t even <em>know </em>what menstruation was until I told her?  At the age of <em>seventeen? </em>  She thought she was kicking people so hard that it was causing internal bleeding <em>in herself.”</em></p><p>Barbara knew that the remainder of her meal was, in essence, a marker of her remaining time on Earth.  She picked up the tray and flung it against the wall so she could lean forward and put her elbows on the table.</p><p>“You have taught her nothing about what it is to live a life,” Barbara said.  “That was me.  And the family behind me.  You <em>wanted </em>a lethal weapon that would protect Ra’s al Ghul.  You <em>got </em>the Batman that made sure he would spend the rest of his life inside a prison cell.”</p><p>“You taught Cassandra to blend in with the sheep,” Shiva said.  “That is in no way impressive.”</p><p>Shiva took Barbara’s lead, flinging the remains of her rapidly cooling MRE against the wall so she could daintily fold her hands on the tabletop.</p><p>“A story,” Shiva said.  “One I’ve grown fond of.  A group of cultists gathered on a mountainside, attempting to summon the Goddess of Death through their worship.  And lo, the Goddess of Death appeared.  She gathered her acolytes in a straight line by the fire, and commanded the one at the very end <em>‘You.  Prove unto me that you exist.’”</em></p><p>Shiva scratched the side of her nose before she continued.  “The one at the very end hemmed and hawed too long for his Goddess’ liking, for the Goddess of Death reached out, dug her fingers beneath his windpipe and tore out his throat.</p><p>“On down the line she went,” Shiva said, “bidding her followers to prove their very existence.  Some resorted to simple biology, others to complex philosophy, all were found wanting.  One by one did the Goddess of Death seep her disapproval into the dirt with the blood of her followers until only two remained.”</p><p>Barbara noticed that Shiva let a grin curl across her lips before she went on.</p><p>“She gave the Second-to-Last Man her command,” Shiva said. <em> “‘You.  Prove unto me that you exist.’ </em>  And so the Second-to-Last Man reached out to the Last Man, and snapped his neck.  And as the Last Man’s corpse cooled at his feet, the Second-to-Last Man said unto The Goddess of Death <em>‘Ask </em>him <em>whether I exist or not.’”</em></p><p>And with her tale told, Lady Shiva let its conclusion hang in the air.</p><p>“What mythology is that from? Barbara asked.  “I can’t place it.”</p><p><em>“That,” </em>Lady Shiva said, “is from <em>Skyrim.”</em></p><p>More than her impending doom, more than sitting across from the most dangerous woman on the planet, more than the food she had to eat, more than even the looming and inky blackness on the wall of the kitchen, the most surreal aspect of the evening had to be this most recent revelation that Lady Shiva had, at one time in her life, played a video game.  She tried to conjure the image of the deadliest assassin in human history grinding out iron daggers to get that Smithing skills of hers up, and that image was rejected like a maxed-out credit card.</p><p>“You taught her the ins-and-outs of an ineffectual and unremarkable life,” Shiva said.  “She can read, she can talk, she can recite Shakespeare upon a stage.  Good for her.  Good for <em>you. </em>  But there is a way in which Cassandra Cain <em>truly </em>expresses herself, and that is with her fists.”</p><p>Lady Shiva narrowed her eyes at Barbara when she said “With every welt she raises and every bone she breaks, it is at <em>my </em>altar she worships and not <em>yours.”</em></p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u"> <em>XV.<br/></em> <em>Yesterday’s Grouse’s Son</em> </span>
</p><p>
  <b>GOTHAM CITY</b>
</p><p>Batgirl and Robin kept up a conversation over the radios in their helmets as they weaved in and out of sparse traffic on their motorcycles, heading to an address on Miagani Island, given to them by Jason Todd.</p><p>“So what do you think this is?” Batgirl asked.</p><p>“No clue,” said Robin in reply.</p><p>“You know him better than I do.”</p><p>“You think I know him at all?”</p><p>“He taught you how to fly the Batwing.”</p><p><em>“Batman </em>taught me how to fly the Batwing,” said Robin.  <em>“Jason </em>ran a really bitchy, really condescending commentary while Batman taught me how to fly the Batwing.  Like a drag show, but for chihuahuas.”</p><p>“So what’s your best guess on what’s at where we’re going?”</p><p>“No idea.  I have to play a song on my phone, and… and I dunno.”</p><p>“I mean, do you think it’s a weapons cache?  A hidden teleporter?”</p><p>“No fucking clue,” Robin said.  “I hope to God there’s not a dog buried in this.”</p><p>Batgirl almost literally had to bite her tongue.  She winced in pain, before she remembered that she was riding a motorcycle, and forced her eyes open.</p><p>“I hope to God there’s not a dog buried in this” sounded like something Juhani would say.</p><p>Juhani was a foreign exchange student attending Gotham Academy.  He was from Finland.</p><p>Juhani was Carrie Kelley’s current boyfriend.</p><p>And Aaliyah Ramsay hated Juhani with every fiber of her being.</p><p>He smelled… weird.  And he had this habit of spouting off translated Finnish idioms, which annoyed Aaliyah for some strange reason.</p><p>All of those could at least forgive, were it not for the fact that Aaliyah was the one to whom Carrie did most of her anxious bitching.</p><p>Namely that Carrie was terrified of reaching second base with Juhani.  Not because she was the unwilling potential recipient of the Ground Rule Double, but the fact that any below-the-neck exploration would result in Juhani’s awareness of the welts and bruises that come part and parcel with life as a teenage costumed vigilante in Gotham City.  The two had been dating a month, and Carrie had yet to come close to an explanation that would not only explain the lumps already there, but would explain away any future bruising that might occur.  Without, of course, making her sound unappealing.</p><p>Carrie had originally done her complaining to Cassandra, but Cass put an end to this with her reply.</p><p>
  <em>“If you were a better fighter, you wouldn’t have this problem.”</em>
</p><p>Batgirl wished Cass was here right now, so she could high-five her all over again.</p><p>“And we’re here,” Robin said.</p><p>They had finally arrived at the address that Jason Todd had given them.  It was the corner of Sixty-Eighth Street and Ivanhoe Boulevard, in a rundown and busted area of Miagani Island.  Near its heart, away from the theater district.</p><p>Batgirl and Robin pulled their bikes up to a plain storefront that reminded Batgirl of an old hardware store back in North Carolina that went out of business on Main Street, and no one ever replaced it.</p><p>They got off their bikes, put their helmets on on their handlebars, shook out their hair, and got their phones out of their utility belts.</p><p>Batgirl looked over at Robin.  Are you--”</p><p>“I’m bringing it up,” Robin said.</p><p>“Me too.”</p><p>They both brought up a song on their phone.  The kind of thing that blasted form radios and coated dance challs long before the dinosaurs passed from the Earth.  Cavedudes and Cavechicks dancing to…</p><p><em>Ring My Bell </em>by Anita Ward.</p><p>The intro played for a few seconds as Batgirl pondered how this relic of a bygone era managed to reach anyone.  For here Batgirl stood, bereft to the urge to either shake an ass to tap a toe.</p><p>“If Jason sent us out here to make an ass ourselves, I’m setting his car on fire.”</p><p>“Batgirl?” Robin asked.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>
  <em>“Batgirl?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“What?”</em>
</p><p>“Look!”</p><p>Batgirl looked and saw that Sixty-Eighth and Ivanhoe… was no longer Sixty-Eighth and Ivanhoe.</p><p>Where once was an abandoned storefront that reminded Batgirl of an old hardware store in a hometown that wasn’t there anymore, there stood a row of male mannequins decked in only the spangliest and gaudiest women’s cocktail dresses.</p><p>Which was… y’know… odd.</p><p>Light reflected on the window of the storefront.  And as they turned off the old disco tune on their phones, Batgirl and Robin turned around.</p><p>A giant digital marquee sign shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow upon the front of a building that wasn’t there a few seconds ago.  The sign beneath it told Batgirl that the building was called <em>“Peeping Tom’s Perpetual Cabaret.”</em></p><p>She had to convince herself that she was still in Gotham.  She looked down this apparently new street, and saw that Gotham City skyline.  So she hadn’t been teleported anywhere.  It was just that the ground beneath her boots had teleported <em>in.</em></p><p>Bright pink letters scrawled across the marquee.</p><p>
  <b>“HeLLo, LoVeLieS!  WhO mIghT YOU bE?”</b>
</p><p>Batgirl looked at Robin… who was beaming.</p><p>“You,” Robin said to the marquee.  “I’ve read about you!  You’re Danny the Street!”</p><p>Letters across the marquee.  Pink ones this time. <b> “gUiLtY aS ChArgEd!”</b></p><p>“Danny the Street?” Batgirl asked.</p><p>“Yeah,” said Robin.  “Used to pal around with the Doom Patrol.  Danny’s a sentient, genderqueer, teleporting street.”</p><p>Batgirl reflected that of all that, the genderqueer part the least conspicuous. Danny being a street, and all.</p><p>Blue letters.  <b>“THe LasT tiME i hEArD tHat SoNG oN ThIS sTrEET, RoBIn wAs A BoY.”</b></p><p>“So that’s how you know Jason, and that’s how Jason knew how to contact you,” said Batgirl.</p><p>Orange letters. <b> “AnD hOW iS the LitTLe dIcKEnS?”</b></p><p>Batgirl and Robin looked at each other before they looked back at the marquee.</p><p>“Let’s just say his life’s been… eventful,” Robin said.</p><p>“How do you know Jason?” Batgirl asked.</p><p>The marquee went plank for a moment, before purple letters flashed <b>“FrONt pAgE.”</b></p><p>As Batgirl looked to Robin to ask just what the hell that was supposed to mean, when her eyes caught a newspaper vending machine.  It sold issues of a newspaper called <em>The Danny Post-Intelligencer. </em>  Today’s headline?</p><p>
  <b>THIS FRONT PAGE, BATGIRL!</b>
</p><p>Batgirl opened the vendor, pulled out the top broadsheet, and brought up the light on her phone so she could read in the Gotham City evening.</p><p>She read aloud. <em> “‘In the good ol’ days, Batman teamed up with the Doom Patrol in Gotham City when Monsieur Mallah and The Brain joined up with Mister Freeze to rob the Gotham Stock Exchange.  I teleported Jason to the corner of Sixty-Eighth and Ivanhoe away from an avalanche Mister Freeze caused on the mainland.  And I told him if he ever needed my help again, all he had to do was play my favorite song on that corner, and I would quite figuratively come running.’”</em></p><p>Batgirl put the newspaper back where she got it, and looked at Robin.</p><p>“Teleportation,” she said.</p><p>Robin smiled the smile that Batgirl could identify instantly.  The kind she smiled when they were both thinking the same thing.</p><p>“Danny,” Robin said.  “We really need your help.  We need to be someplace, and we need to be there now.”</p><p>Yellow letters on the marquee.  <b>“WhERe tO, LoveLiES?”</b></p><p>Batgirl grinned, and asked “Is Italy nice this time of year?”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Part Five (of Six)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XVI.</em>
    <em>
      <br/>
    </em>
    <em>Service At Your Door</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>“What you have taught her,” said Lady Shiva, “is nothing but surface-level camouflage.  The futile efforts of trying to force a square peg made of gold into a round hole made of tin.  Forcing her to walk among her woeful inferiors while attempting to convince a Goddess that she is a real live girl.”</p><p>“Reading and writing is surface-level camo?” Barbara asked.</p><p>“Yes,” said Shiva.  “All that matters is life and death.  The control and the fear thereof.  I can manipulate it, I can prolong it… or I can end it.  With as little effort as snapping my fingers.”</p><p>“Uh-huh,” said Barbara,  “So they don’t call you <em>‘Shiva’ </em>because it’s a pretty name.”</p><p>Lady Shiva reached to the side of the table at which they sat, and flipped it with one hand.  The loud clatter that resulted bounced off of the cramped walls of the Villa Sammartino’s kitchen.  Barbara fluttered inside, hoping she looked more cool and collected than she felt.</p><p>And the stretch of inky blackness on the wall behind Shiva seemed to have gotten bigger somehow.</p><p>“So when I find,” Shiva said, “that Cassandra Cain… my <em>daughter… </em>the <em>flesh of my flesh, </em>started dressing up in a funny little costume with the rest of the malcontents and imbeciles, and refuses to use the talents I gave her to take lives… It does not make me happy.  And sitting here with the woman who had a hand in her inexcusable weakness does not make me happy either.”</p><p>She leaned forward into the empty air between them.  “I will kill you, Barbara Gordon.  I will flay the flesh from your bones with my bare hands, and when Cassandra hears of what I have done, that will force the confrontation that’s necessary for both she and I to move forward.”</p><p>Barbara sighed.  Trying to look unimpressed.  But there was a wavering in her breath that betrayed her fear.</p><p>“So… you’re looking to fight your daughter to the death.”</p><p>“Yes,” said Shiva.  “There has to be a greatest.  We both have to either expand and evolve… or die.  Neither she nor I can do that while the other lives.”</p><p>“I gotta ask,” said Barbara.  “What, uh… What if she wins?”</p><p>“Are you hoping to expose my arrogance?” Shiva asked with a smile.  “If Cassandra wins, then I will have failed at that to which I have devoted my life.  My existence would be forfeit.  As it should be.”</p><p>“So you’re not afraid?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Not even a little bit?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>Barbara nodded.  Hoping to appeal to the Patron Saint of Piss and Vinegar, she leaned in as well.  Her face and Shiva’s were mere inches apart.</p><p>“You don’t feel it, do you?” Barbara asked.</p><p>There wasn’t a perceptible shift in Shiva’s expression.  More a general softening of the aura.</p><p>“I’m in love with one of the Green Lanterns,” Barbara said.  “I’m never going to see him again.  I have a five-month-old son at home.  Little Jimmy.  I’m not seeing him again either.  And… I’m not seeing Cass again.”</p><p>A broad sadness seeped into her chest.  Hell, it was better than fear.  She could feel her pulse lowering.</p><p>“I haven’t spoken to Cass in a year,” Barbara said.  “And now… Shit… I’m a creature of ego.  And so are you.  We both think we have time until there’s no time left.  See… I didn’t know I had it in me until I took Cassandra Wayne under my wing.  Didn’t think I had it in me to matter to another human being the way I… in the way I wanted to without even <em>knowing </em>I wanted to.  And now it’s gone.”</p><p>Barbara scratched the side of her nose.</p><p>“So ask me if I’m scared right now,” Barbara said.  “Go ahead, ask me.”</p><p>Shiva didn’t say anything.</p><p>“I’m fucking <em>terrified,” </em>said Barbara.  “I have people I love, and I have people who love me back.  I have a story, and it’ll be told after I’m gone.  Which is infinitely more than you have, you… <em>broken </em>fucking toy.”</p><p>That generally softened aura of Lady Shiva’s sure did harden back up again right quick.</p><p>“You don’t have love in you,” Barbara said.  “And I’m damn sure that the reason you’re so cavalier about your own death, is that no one cares if you live.  And when you’re gone, all that’s going to be left are your statistics.  How many people you killed.  You’re the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.  And the only one who gives a rat’s ass about how good you are at killing people is you.  And that’s really all you have.”</p><p>Barbara took a deep breath.  In speech class, she’d have called this <em>“The Summation.”</em></p><p>“When my little boy grows up,” Barbara said, “and he asks what his mommy was like, he’s gonna hear that I looked the Goddess of Death in the eye… and laughed in her face like the inferior that she is.”</p><p>She looked Shiva up and down before she said her last words.  And if, one were to have told her fifteen years prior what her last words would be, she would not have believed they were so tied to the man who had, for a time, put her in a wheelchair.</p><p>“Ha… Ha… Ha.”</p><p>Silence followed.</p><p>Barbara could not see it, but she could sense it.  The muscles tightening beneath Shiva’s long coat.  She was going to make her move.  Barbara Gordon had mere seconds left to live.</p><p>This was the first thing she noticed.</p><p>The <em>second </em>thing she noticed, on the other hand, was the inky blackness on the wall over Lady Shiva’s right shoulder.  It had gotten bigger over the course of the conversation.  But only now did it choose to actually balloon outward.  On the flat plane of the wall, it had been a foot away from Shiva.  Now it was about four inches.</p><p><em>Something </em>on the other side was trying to get out.</p><p>The concern over this development must have showed on Barbara’s face.</p><p>“Miss Gordon,” Shiva said in a drawl, “if you expect me to fall for so old a tr--”</p><p>
  <b>THWOOM!</b>
</p><hr/><p>
  <b>MASTERPIECE</b>
</p><p>Bluebird, Black Canary, and Jinny Hex dug the rebreathers out of their jackets and coats.  Little hourglass-shaped plastic thingies with mouthpieces good for four minutes of oxygen.</p><p>The hulking, bald, and dangerous Hammerhead, who was standing on the beach with her arms folded, assured them they wouldn’t need the full four minutes.</p><p>The three Birds of Prey waded into the water for a few feet beneath the bright painted sun until their heads vanished beneath the azure water.</p><p>The cool, clear ocean, rendered in loving detail with oil paint, started getting darker, and darker, and darker, until all was black.</p><p>Yet still they swam.</p><p>The darkness kept getting thicker, until it was like swimming through saliva, gross as that was for Harper Row to imagine.</p><p>They kept swimming.  The water got thicker.</p><p>Until it was like swimming through paint.</p><p>At about minute three, they came to a solid membrane in the water.  It felt thin to Bluebird’s fingers, but it was there.</p><p>She tried to breach it.  Tried to claw through it.  And it was about the time that Bluebird worried about how much air she had left that she heard something on the other side of the membrane.</p><p>“Miss Gordon, if you expect me to fall for so old a tr--”</p><p>Bluebird’s fingers broke through and hit air.</p><hr/><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>
  <b>THWOOM!</b>
</p><p>The wall seemingly just… <em>broke. </em>  And the inky blackness came forth in a torrent so strong that it knocked both Barbara and Shiva out of their chairs and to the floor.</p><p>A chemical tang hit Barbara Gordon’s nostrils, and it told her that this black stuff was paint.  She’d have been ankle deep in the shit, if she were standing in it.</p><p>She started coughing, as some of it had gotten into her mouth.  At first, Barbara thought her ears were playing tricks on her, as it seemed that there were multiple people coughing.  More than were in this Italian villa’s kitchen previously.</p><p>Until finally, the voice of the angel heading up the choir invisible made itself known, sounding an awful lot  like it came from West Texas.</p><p>“My… Gott… Damn… HAT!”</p><p>Barbara got enough of the black paint shit out of her eyes to open them.  And there, similarly drenched in black paint, stood Jinny Hex, Bluebird, and Black Canary.</p><p>Close to imminent death though she had been, Barbara could not keep her sudden and all-abiding joy to herself.</p><p>
  <em>“Dinah!”</em>
</p><p>Black Canary wiped a handful of black paint off of her face and smiled, her white teeth like stars amidst the mess that was the rest of her face.</p><p>“Hey, boo.”</p><p>“What the fuck happened to you?”</p><p>Still smiling, Black Canary said “Y’know, its a… funny… story…”</p><p>At which point, the smiling stopped.</p><p>Because Black Canary saw with whom Barbara Gordon had just been sharing a kitchen.</p><p>The paint had not gotten on Lady Shiva’s face.  She was peering up at Dinah Lance-Choi, a woman with which a great deal of history was mutually shared.</p><p>Black Canary was a meta-human, blessed with a <em>“Canary Cry” </em>strong enough to liquefy steel.  She was also a warrior, and had sworn never to use this ability on anyone who was not similarly powered.</p><p>However, deep in a drunken stupor, Dinah had told Barbara that there was one exception to this self-imposed rule, and only one.</p><p>And that one expectation was getting to her feet with a smile on her face.</p><p>Black Canary drew in a breath.</p><p>And in a flash, Lady Shiva’s right hand was around Black Canary’s throat.</p><p>Jinny and Bluebird, who had seemingly just woken up, went after both of them.  With Shiva seemingly preoccupied, that meant she was at least momentarily vulnerable.  Jinny grabbed Black Canary’s shoulder while Bluebird grabbed Shiva’s, and they shoved them both through the window.</p><p>Barbara reckoned she’d have done the same thing.  Dinah would have forgiven any of them if it caught Shiva on the backfoot.</p><p>As the kitchen window shattered, Barbara got to her feet.  The three of them, Barbara, Jinny Hex, and Bluebird, stood at the broken window, looking out at Black Canary and Lady Shiva, who had landed in the street outside.</p><p>Which was a hell of an accomplishment.  A half an hour before, there hadn’t been a street there at all.  There had been a hedge maze.</p><p>The quaint storefronts and the garish cabaret sign were not the first things Barbara noticed.</p><p>No, the first thing she noticed were two very familiar silhouettes.  One of which had a very familiar voice.</p><p>“We get here in time?” Robin asked.</p><p>It couldn’t be Batgirl and Robin standing over Black Canary and Lady Shiva.  It just couldn’t be.  It was a hallucination and nothing more.</p><p>But hallucinations were not contagious.  Bluebird confirmed it because, yes, she saw them too.</p><p>“Those two little shits are supposed to be in Gotham watching our kids,” Bluebird said.</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XVII.<br/></em>
    <em>The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO - FIFTEEN YEARS AGO</b>
</p><p>A year ago, Toni <em>“Argent” </em>Monetti asked Crazy Jane a question during the Battle of Founders Island, right before she died.</p><p>
  <em>“What did Coagula say to get Harley Quinn to dance with her at Batman and Catwoman’s wedding?”</em>
</p><p>On the flight to Italy, after a year of working up the nerve, Jane finally asked Coagula.</p><p>To which Kate <em>“Coagula” </em>Godwin replied:</p><p><em>“I told her </em>‘My powers are turning solid things liquid and liquid things solid.  If Ocean Master takes out Aquaman and Atlantis attacks the surface, I can stop them all by myself.’”</p><p>Which was a surprise to Jane.  Knowing Kate (and hypothesizing about Harley), she figured it would be lurid and altogether unseemly.</p><p>This venture to Italy along with the rest of the Doom Patrol to find a stray Dayton Device from the old, bad, Niles Caulder days was the first time Jane had done conventional superheroing since that December night a year ago.</p><p>Since the sixty-four alters in the head of Kay Challis became the one-hundred-nine.</p><p>There were dark things in The Underground.  Alters skittering around the tunnels, forming their stations in secret, expanding, causing migraines, cold sweats, and the occasional dry heave.</p><p>It wasn’t the crowding.  It was the secrecy.  Crazy Jane was sharing a subconscious with some very powerful, very bashful strangers.  It was the ragged edge that caused her to take as many mulligans as humanly possible from crimefighting over the past year.  Jane figured that a simple pickup in Italy wouldn’t cause the dreaded question of <em>“Are you okay?”</em></p><p>The pickup was anything but simple.</p><p>They came on the Doom Patrol’s private plane, which in itself was a holdover from the Caulder days, and thank Crhist the Patrol had an actual pilot on staff in the form of Larry <em>“Negative Man” </em>Trainor.  It was him, Jane, Robotman, and Coagula.  Just the four since Rita <em>“Elastiwoman” </em>Farr left the team in grief over the death of Garfield <em>“Beast Boy” </em>Logan, who had also perished a year ago in Gotham City.</p><p>The Doom Patrol landed on an airfield thirty miles from Pizzoferrato, and drove to the Villa Sammartino in a rented van.  It took Negative Man a while to get a handle on a vehicle with the steering wheel on the opposite side while having to drive on the left side of the road.</p><p>The Villa looked abandoned.</p><p>It was not.</p><p>It was Negative Man who hit the mine in the hedge maze outside. It didn’t kill him, but it did knock him back unconscious.  Robotman, upon cursory inspection, found an ordnance casing that bore a striking resemblance to a golf tee.</p><p>Coagula went down in the Villa foyer.  Electric darts made with heavily modified badminton shuttlecocks.  It was a miracle she didn’t die.  The contact wounds burnt through her shirt, and dear <em>God, </em>the <em>smell...</em></p><p>So with the man with an otherworldly entity in his chest and the woman who utilized her ability to take on the Atlantean navy single-handed in her pickup lines out of commission, all that was left was the heavy hitting Robotman, and a Crazy Jane who was unpredictable to begin with, and even more so now with a heaping helping of year-old trauma.</p><p>They found their antagonist in the cellar.</p><p>Lawrence <em>“Sportsmaster” </em>Crock.</p><p>His sports-themed get-up and equipment were funny to anyone who never had to face him.  Sportsmaster was an assassin and mercenary with more bodies on him than some natural disasters.</p><p>And with the Dayton Device on his head, he was even more dangerous.</p><p>As Jane huddled in the corner of the cellar, trying to will an alter with some stopping power from The Underground, Robotman futilely banged his metal fists against walls of solidified oxygen hovering in front of Sportsmaster’s face, with Sportsmaster himself laughing behind his hockey mask.</p><p>With the baseball bat he carried, Sportsmaster hit a line drive off of the side of Robotman’s head, his augmented strength sending the former Cliff Steele into the far wall.</p><p>And then Sportsmaster’s cold blue eyes fell upon Crazy Jane.</p><p>“Whatsamatter, honey?” he asked.  “You somehow even more worthless than your friends?”</p><p>Jane could hear the smile behind the mask… and she could almost feel lit side off as the spider-like Dayton Device started glowing on his head.</p><p>“Jesus,” Sportsmaster said.  “What’s, uh… What’s goin’ on here?”</p><p>Crazy Jane clenched her eyes shut, and sent herself deep… deep…</p><hr/><p>
  <em>...deep</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Scraping the depths of The Underground.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The One Who Was Jane held no power, save to keep the other denizens in line, but that power waned.  The One-Hundred-Nine grew defiant.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Jane’s consciousness spread through the stations, infused the brick, begging and pleading in a keen like razors.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Until finally, one personality was shoved forth, shivering into the light.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Crazy Jane had closed her eyes.</p><p>But it was the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter who opened them.</p><p>The painter.  The artist.</p><p>The one who had absolutely no business performing the rites of destruction that the others who were summoned to the surface partook in.  Others like Hammerhead, and Sun Daddy, and Silvertongue.</p><p>Each alter underwent a physical alteration when they surfaced from The Underground, from the slightness of hairstyle to the bluntness of musculature.  The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was permanently flecked in paint.  She took a moment to regard her blue and red and green-smeared fingers before she looked up and saw Sportsmaster trying to wrench the Dayton Device off of his head.</p><p>Immediately, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter knew what she had to do.</p><p>She reached into the pocket of her long, black skirt (thankfully this was a skirt with pockets) and found a tube of black oil paint.  For she was The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, and she <em>always </em>had paint on her.</p><p>She got to her feet and started charging toward Sportsmaster as quickly as she could...which wasn’t all that fast in the grand scheme of things, as The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter had never been called upon to exert herself physically.  All the while she pried the cap off the tube of black paint.</p><p>And right before she tackled the brightly glowing Sportsmaster, she whipped a line of black paint onto the wall behind him.</p><p>Every alter within the mind of Kay Challis had powers and abilities, and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was an artist.  More so than that, whatever she painted she could interact with.  She could alter it.  Grant it new properties.</p><p>And that is what she did.</p><p>As Sportsmaster glowed his brightest, obscuring them from view, both he and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter fell into the line of paint.</p><p>Into the blackness.</p><p>Into…</p><hr/><p>
  <b>THE VOID</b>
</p><p>The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter landed on a surface both spongy and rocky.  Black as night.</p><p>Black as paint.</p><p>She got to her feet on wobbly knees and looked out.</p><p>A seemingly infinite horizon greeted her.  A dull creme matching the paint on the walls of the Villa Sammartino’s cellar.  And dotting the dull, pleasant infinitude, here and there, were her sisters.  The other one-hundred-eight personalities that occupied a single mind, a single Underground.</p><p>The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter felt... something.  The thrum of anticipation.  The recognition of potential upon spying, with grateful eyes, a blank canvas.</p><p>But what she heard was sizzling and snapping.</p><p>She turned to see Sportsmaster yanking the sparking, malfunctioning Dayton Device off of his head.</p><p>The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter did not know that the Dayton Device would short out instead of explode… but something told her the fact that she didn’t <em>want </em>it to explode, here, in this place, was all that was needed for it not to do so.</p><p>Sportsmaster looked around, the deceased piece of machinery in his hand, and asked:</p><p>“Where the fuck are we?”</p><p>A large, meaty hand with scarred knuckles fell upon Sportsmaster’s shoulder.  It belonged to a woman who looked like The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (or Crazy Jane, for that matter) were her head shaved, and her skin stretched across the skeleton of a gorilla.</p><p>It was Hammerhead.</p><p>“Jason Voorhees, right?” Hammerhead asked Sportsmaster.  <em>“Big </em>fuckin’ fan.”</p><p>It is a truism, held among most of their ilk, that superheroes follow the lead of Superman and Batman, and not kill the villains with which they contend.  Not everyone agreed with it.  Indeed, not every alter of the One-Hundred-Nine agreed with it.</p><p>For Hammerhead placed her other hand on Sportsmaster’s face…</p><p>...and ripped his head off.</p><p>The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter felt no moral outrage or squeamishness at the sight.  She could only marvel at the arc of crimson coming from the stump of his neck.  Hammerhead spiked the severed head onto the black surface of the void, and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter  saw the light glint on his lifeless blue eyes as it spun to a halt.</p><p>“Touchdown,” Hammerhead said.  She almost sounded bashful about it.</p><p>She looked around, before looking back at The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.</p><p>“It’s a good question, though.  Where the fuck are we?”</p><p>The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter blinked.  Her mind was clear because it was hers.  She didn’t have to share it with company.  Whatever she felt looking at this place led her to… to…</p><p>She reached into the other pocket of her skirt, and retrieved a tube of blue paint.  She twisted off the cap, squeezed a blot onto her right index finger, and concentrated as she brought her finger down.</p><p>The blue paint arced along the thin air.  Against absolute nothing.</p><p>The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter smiled as tears bloomed in her eyes.</p><p>“You alright?” Hammerhead asked.  “You go all fucky?”</p><p>The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter didn’t say anything.</p><p>This was an entire universe with which she could do as she pleased.</p><p>She closed her eyes and saw it.  Every drop of water, every stone walkway, every cloud, every grain of sand on the beach.</p><p>She saw what she wanted to do.</p><p>The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter saw her masterpiece.</p><hr/><p>
  <b>MASTERPIECE - NOW</b>
</p><p>Crazy Jane emerged from the line of palm trees and onto the white sands of the painted beach.</p><p>Hammerhead stood on the water’s edge, looking out into the infinite ocean.  The Birds of Prey were nowhere in sight.  So Hammerhead did as was requested of her, and chaperoned their asses back to the real world.</p><p>Jane felt intruded upon.  Those three women in a space so private.  She felt on edge, as though she’d vibrate off into space, or something.</p><p>And seeing Hammerhead, her arms folded with her back to her, told Jane that she wasn’t faring any better.</p><p>“What’s wrong with you?” Jane asked.</p><p>Hammerhead’s shoulders heaved up and down as she sighed.</p><p>“I love this place,” she said.  “I really fuckin’ do.”</p><p>“Then what’s the problem?”</p><p>Another deep breath.  “Because I know it’s over,” Hammerhead said.  “I know we’re fuckin’ leaving.”</p><p>Jane had absolutely no idea where Hammerhead got such a foolish notion.</p><p>First thing first, however.</p><p>“Has anyone ever told you you talk like you’re in a Rob Zombie movie?” Jane asked.</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XVIII.<br/></em>
    <em>Dannybrook</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>“Holy shit,” Robin said.  “It’s Lady Shiva!”</p><p>Batgirl saw.  Batgirl saw the nightmare that haunted her mentor.  The woman who caused the face of Cassandra Wayne to fall whenever the subject of either mothers or nemeses came up in conversation.</p><p>Once upon a time, a man named Bruce Wayne became Batman, and as Batman, the greatest and most chilling foe he ever faced was another man named The Joker.  But then The Joker died, and Bruce Wayne’s found that his life had been so entangled with that of his fallen enemy that he took off The Batman’s cape for three years to grieve.</p><p>But then Bruce Wayne grew old.  He adopted a daughter and set the cape aside for her to take up in his stead.  And now, before Aaliyah Ramsay, the same fiendish north star rose across from Black Canary.  The most dangerous enemy of her boss.  The thing that kept the second Batman up at night.</p><p>And Batgirl felt fear.</p><p>As Bluebird, Jinny Hex, and Oracle (in her Oracle mask) piled out of the front door of the Villa Sammartino, and onto the cold pavement of Danny the Street, Black Canary stood across from Lady Shiva, one glaring at the other.</p><p>And for a reason that no doubt would need to be explained to Batgirl later, they were all drenched in black paint.</p><p>Batgirl had seen Black Canary train.  She knew how fast and how strong she was.  This was the woman, after all, who taught the first Superman how to fight.</p><p>And she had only heard the most chilling ghost stories of how deadly the feet and fists of Lady Shiva truly were.</p><p>Even Robin, Oracle, Bluebird, and Jinny stood rooted to the spot.</p><p>Because when a title fight was brewing, you stopped and you watched.</p><p>Shiva took a step forward.</p><p>Black Canary did the same.</p><p>And it was on.</p><p>They were so fast that Batgirl, in the moment, did not have the capability of ascertaining who, in fact, threw the first punch.  Or if it was even a punch at all.</p><p>Black Canary and Lady Shiva were both so formidably fast that they had each been ducking and weaving around each others’ attempts at offense.  Several furious, agonizing seconds passed without either of them landing anything.  The five women watching them had unblinking eyes as big as saucers.</p><p>It was too good to last, though.</p><p>It took a bit, but Batgirl saw the flaw.  Black Canary was under the impression that in order to successfully take down Shiva, it had to be done as quickly as humanly possible.  So she put her all into her opening salvo.</p><p>But she was facing someone who was not only far quicker than she, but someone who could afford to conserve her energy and bide her time.</p><p>And so, the fight was lost.</p><p>Shiva ducked a left cross, and sent her right palm into Black Canary’s throat.  As she struggled to breathe, Shiva stood back up straight, and laid in a right kick to her gut that sounded like a car backfiring.  Robbed of all her breath, Black Canary only wobbled as Lady Shiva unloaded a right to the jaw that sent her flying.</p><p>Black Canary’s head banged off of one of Danny the Street’s old timey light poles, before she crumpled to the pavement in a heap, unconscious.</p><p>The Birds of Prey’s combat ringer was out cold.</p><p>Lady Shiva folded her arms over her chest and smiled the smile of a feudal lord overseeing a traitorous serf’s death by boiling oil.</p><p>In the scant few seconds that followed, a thought seemed to zing back and forth among the women who had stopped and stared at Lady Shiva, thanks to the low-grade telepathy that had a habit of developing among human beings who knew each other during times of crisis.</p><p>
  <em>Bum-rush her!</em>
</p><p>Robin broke away from Batgirl as she, Oracle, Bluebird, and Jinny Hex all took a running start at Lady Shiva.  She was just one woman.  She shouldn’t be able to last long against five well-trained superheroes, no matter how good she was.</p><p>
  <em>Right?</em>
</p><p>But Batgirl didn’t join the rush.  As her colleagues descended on Lady Shiva, she took a left turn to the marquee of Peeping Tom’s Perpetual Cabaret.  And she kept her voice down, in case Shiva could hear her.</p><p>Because Batgirl had an idea.</p><p>“Danny?” she asked.  </p><p>The sound of Robin screaming in agony and a body hitting the street, before Danny the Street responded in blue letters across the marquee’s digital face.</p><p>
  <b>“YeAh, HoN?”</b>
</p><p>Batgirl got her phone from her utility belt, and got ready to fire off a text.</p><p>“Please help us in whatever way you can,” Batgirl said.  “But in ten minutes, I need you to teleport to a very specific place.”</p><p>Red letters. <b> “SuRe ThiNg.  WhErE tO?”</b></p><p>Batgirl smiled.</p><p>Ten minutes.</p><p>If they all lasted that long.</p><hr/><p>
  <b>MASTERPIECE</b>
</p><p>“This is the thing,” Hammerhead said.  “This is the thing I can’t fuckin’ stand about you.”</p><p>“There are so many things you can’t stand about me,” Crazy Jane said.  “You’re gonna have to narrow it down.”</p><p>“You’re the last one to know your own fuckin’ mind.”</p><p>“Uh-huh.”</p><p>“See, you already know what you’re gonna fuckin’ do,” Hammerhead said.  “So all one-hundred-eight of the rest of us have to sit around until it finally dawns on you to do what you know you were gonna do before the fuckin’ jump.”</p><p>Jane folded her arms and said “You’re… gonna have to explain that one to me.”</p><p>“You’re going back out there,” said Hammerhead.  “Out into the real world.”</p><p>“No, I’m not.”</p><p>“Yes, you are.”</p><p>“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”</p><p>Hammerhead scratched her bald scalp.  “Alright, simple bitch, answer me somethin’.”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>Hammerhead huffed.  “If you didn’t want to get out of here so fuckin’ bad, then why did you tell Black Canary and her friends any-and-every-fuckin’-thing about the night Argent died?”</p><p>“They walk through an Italian mansion and find themselves in an oil painting, I had to tell them <em>something.”</em></p><p><em>“But did you have to tell them that?” </em>Hammerhead asked.  Loud.  So loud in fact that there was a faint echo.</p><p>“Look,” Hammerhead said.  “I’ve known you long enough to know that you’ll avoid therapy like the plague.  Three superheroes come through the door, and you tell them about one of the worst parts of your life.  Just like that.  Which tells me you’ve been dying for someone to talk to for the last fifteen fuckin’ years.”</p><p>“I have people to talk to,” Jane said.  “I have a hundred-and-eight people to talk to.”</p><p>“You have a hundred-and-eight versions of yourself,” Hammerhead said in retort.  “Fat load of fuckin’ good that does.  You’re the thing that links us.  We all know what you know.  That’s your thing.  That’s the power you have.  That’s how you roped us into all that superhero bullshit for so long.”</p><p>“I’m not a superhero,” Jane said.  “I don’t have it in me anymore.  I don’t think I ever did.  I tagged along with Doom Patrol buddies, but that’s it.”</p><p>To which Hammerhead rolled her eyes, put her hands on her hips, and said nothing.</p><p>“Nothing?” Jane asked.</p><p>Hammerhead kept her silence.</p><p>“Are we at the last foot of the mile of shit you talk?” Jane asked.  “Or are you done?”</p><p>Hammerhead raised her head to Jane, with a glint in her eye.</p><p>“The night Argent died,” Hammerhead said, “you were the one who caught her before she fell.  Not Black Canary or Huntress.  Not Bumblebee or Frankenstein.  You.  She bled her last all over your fuckin’ clothes, and you still kept her up a few more seconds as though it would change something.”</p><p>Hammerhead folded her arms again.</p><p>“What’s that line you like?” Hammerhead asked.  “The one you give when someone thanks you for a job well done? <em> ‘Do I look like a fuckin’ superhero to you?’ </em>  Yeah, well…  The night Argent died, piss scared though you fuckin’ were, you think there was anybody in the world who woulda told you <em>‘No?’”</em></p><p>And Jane… didn’t have anything to say to that.</p><p>She didn’t like hearing nice things about herself.  Hearing that she had not only acquitted herself admirably, but nobly made Crazy Jane the kind of uncomfortable she associated with invasive doctor’s exams.  </p><p>But hearing all that from such a no-bullshit source like Hammerhead just set her brain on fire.</p><p>Jane was assembling her thoughts.  Trying to pluck them through the haze and hammer them into words… when she noticed that Hammerhead had become preoccupied with something off in the distance, down Masterpiece’s shoreline.  Jane looked down there as well.</p><p>Two people were walking down the sand toward them.</p><p>One tall.</p><p>And one short.</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XIX.<br/></em>
    <em>The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PIZZOFERRATO</b>
</p><p>An elbow to the side of the head dropped Robin in front of Lady Shiva.  An immaculately curving round house pushed Oracle, Bluebird, and Jinny back.</p><p>The only one who didn’t drop from that kick was Jinny.  She shook it off, squared up, and went in.</p><p>Batgirl, who was looking for an angle to do her thing, wondered just precisely what in the hell Jinny was going to do in this situation.  Jinny was formidable, sure, but Jinny was a barfighter and Lady Shiva was an Overgod that dealt death as casually as blinking.</p><p>Jinny let off a haymaker that Shiva looked almost humiliated to be asked to dodge.  But dodge she did.  Velvety smooth and lightning fast, Shiva grabbed Jinny’s outstretched fist and pulled back with her right hand.</p><p>And Jinny howled in pain.</p><p>The four main fingers on Jinny’s right hand were bent back at an unnatural angle.  Which, for a gunfighter like Jinny, was catastrophic.</p><p>Unless Jinny Hex got a hell of a lot more friendly with the concept of kicking during a fight, then she was out.</p><p>Shiva brought her hand up Jinny’s arm and used that one hand to fling Jinny through a shop window selling antique typewriters next to them.</p><p>A flash of light appeared behind Batgirl and she paused to look, for less than a second, but still saw the purple letters on the marquee of Peeping Tom’s Perpetual Cabaret.</p><p>
  <b>“YeEEeEeOuoCH!”</b>
</p><p>Batgirl looked back on the fight just in time to see Bluebird unleash a pistol, aim it at Shiva’s head, and fire.</p><p>Shiva twitched her head reflexively, without looking, and dodged the slow-moving taser projectile.  She looked from the destroyed shop window down to Bluebird and, with an expression of contempt, stomped on Bluebird’s face.  Batgirl heard a dull crunch and a watery groan.</p><p>Batgirl liberated a Batarang from her utility belt and let fly.</p><p>And Shiva caught it.</p><p>Lady Shiva levelled her gaze at Batgirl.  It was a gaze the bordered on… amusement?  </p><p>But Batgirl felt nothing but terror.</p><p>Shiva dropped the Batarang and began to slowly walk toward Batgirl.  Fear kept Batgirl rooted to the spot.</p><p>Oracle ran up behind Shiva.  Shiva dropped her on her back with a one-legged mule kick without even deigning to look at her.  Oracle’s green holographic mask just blinked out.</p><p>Batgirl at least had it in her to bring her fists up.</p><p>Lady Shiva was a foot-and-a-half away when she just… stopped.</p><p>“Well?” Shiva asked.  “Go on, then.”</p><p>Batgirl threw a punch.  Shiva caught it in her palm, and then dropped it.  To Batgirl, it was like punching a wooden folding table.</p><p>“Again.”</p><p>Batgirl threw another one.  Shiva caught it with the other hand.</p><p>“Is punching all you do?” Lady Shiva asked.  There was an odd smile spreading across her lips.  </p><p>Batgirl let loose with a flurry of kicks, which Shiva dodged.  She reared back for another punch…</p><p>...and Shiva wrapped a hand around Batgirl’s throat before she could unload it.  That smile of amusement having become a smile of glee.</p><p>“I knew that form was familiar,” Shiva said, a lilt in her voice. “I trained your mother.”</p><p>Batgirl couldn’t breathe.  She tried banging on Shiva’s arm, but it was like banging on concrete.</p><p>“Talia al Ghul shat out a brat,” Shiva said, a barely restrained laugh in her throat.  “I tell you, when she receives word that you died by my hand, she will be honored.”</p><p>Shiva squeezed tighter…</p><p>...and only let go when the world exploded.</p><p>Or did it.</p><p>It was a surprise, certainly.  Batgirl dropped to her knees and looked up to see what had happened.</p><p>A second ago, it was a balmy night in Italy.</p><p>Now?</p><p>Now the sun was shining in the middle of a blizzard.</p><hr/><p>
  <b>MASTERPIECE</b>
</p><p>There was a rumble in this dimension.  One so pronounced that it caused the calm painted ocean surrounding Masterpiece to ripple.</p><p>But Jane paid it no mind.  All that she was concerned with were the two figures heading toward she and Hammerhead on the coastline.</p><p>Seconds passed, and the identities of these two alters became clear.</p><p>They were identically dressed.  Indeed, all who dwelt in Masterpiece were.  The same long black skirt and the same Philadelphia Flyers shirt.</p><p>The taller one, permanently flecked in paint, was The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.  She had a serene smile upon her face.  In her right hand was a bottle of painted beer.</p><p>The smaller one was…</p><p>...was…</p><p>Jane could scarcely believe it.  The one among the One-Hundred-Nine who was seen the least, but in whose name the entire enterprise was founded.</p><p>This was five-year-old Kay Challis.  The one who made them in self-defense from the wickedness of her father.</p><p>Her button nose was adorable.  Light seemed to get lost in her shoulder-length black hair.  And her brown eyes glittered like diamonds at the bottom of a well into which a weak flashlight shone.</p><p>Jane tore her eyes away from Jane, The Primary, to look at Hammerhead.</p><p>Hammerhead had been conjured before Jane had.  In those old bad days when rage was more called for than restraint.  Jane had read some feminist blog years and years back that made the proclamation that misandry did not exist.  To which Jane had replied, silently, to herself, that the author had clearly never met Hammerhead.  Hammerhead had antipathy towards everyone, but she reserved her white-out hatred for men.  The fact that Black Canary and her friends were women was the only thing that kept them alive upon their arrival at Masterpiece. </p><p>Thus was the creature that Kay Challis had created in the darkest hours of her need.</p><p>But the look on Hammerhead’s face now was one of almost-daughterly admiration and affection for the child in their midst.</p><p>Finally Jane’s eyes rested on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter.</p><p>“We don’t see you around here all that often,” Jane said.</p><p>“Nope,” said The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter as she surveyed the ocean, grinning faintly before taking a pull off her beer.</p><p>“What’s with the smile?” Jane asked.</p><p>The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter spared the coast one last glance before she said:</p><p>“I think I’m done.”</p><p>With that, Jane looked back down to Kay.  Upon her face was the confident smile of a messiah with a pocketful of miracles to fling haphazardly upon anyone she met.</p><p>Hammerhead told Jane that she was the last to know her own mind, but in this moment, Jane reflected upon who gave her that mind to begin with.</p><p>Kay Challis’ smile sealed it.</p><p>They had their instructions.</p><p>They were going home.</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XX.<br/></em>
    <em>We Remember You, Mister Clemente</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>KATHMANDU</b>
</p><p>The sun shone bright over the outskirts of the Nepalese capital.  The jewel on the entry to the Himalayas.  The current site of a blizzard.</p><p>And the newest teleportation spot for Danny the Street.</p><p>There was no visibility.  Batgirl could not see more than a foot away from her face.  </p><p>Which meant that Lady Shiva couldn’t either.</p><p>Confusion had apparently loosened her grip.  Batgirl wriggled, and she was loose.  Quicker than a hiccup, she turned and bolted.  She heard Shiva behind her, yelling “HEY!”</p><p>Batgirl ignored that.</p><p>Batgirl ignored the single most blistering cold that the North Carolina girl had ever encountered.</p><p>Batgirl could not, however, ignore the snow.  But she didn’t need to.  For her game plan was simple: Keep running until she hit a wall.</p><p>It took about ten seconds.  Thank heavens she had her hands in front of her, or she’d have collided with a thump that would have been audible over the howling wind.  Like blood in the water for a shark, that definitely would have summoned Shiva.</p><p>She slowly navigated the brown brick wall until she found a steel door.</p><p>“Please be unlocked,” Batgirl said to herself.  “Please, <em>please </em>be unlocked.”</p><p>It was unlocked.  This being Danny the Street, for all she knew, the door unlocked when she asked it to.</p><p>She opened the door to find that she was in the shop with the drag mannequins that was her first introduction to Danny some minutes before.  And huddled beneath the window, cradling her mangled hand, was Jinny Hex.</p><p>Jinny used her good hand to wave Batgirl over.  Not one to turn down such hospitality, Batgirl huddled down on the floor next to her.  There were still bits of storefront window in her hair.</p><p>She cast a glance out the window, and saw a field of white… with one vast shadow in the distance.  She needed a second, but Batgirl finally figured out what it was.</p><p>It was the Villa Sammartino.</p><p>Danny took the goddamn house with him.  In Pizzoferrato, the locals were going to wake up and see that that ancient house was just gone.  Batgirl didn’t know Danny could do that… but if they could teleport people, they could teleport things.</p><p>“You alright?” Batgirl asked.</p><p>To which Jinny wordlessly held up her right hand.  It was bleeding just above the palm, and her four fingers were bent at cruel angles toward each other.</p><p>Batgirl’s stomach did a pitiful flip.  “Resetting those is gonna be a bitch,” she said.</p><p>“Thanks ever so much for remindin’ me,” Jinny said.</p><p>With her left hand, Jinny reached into her long coat and pulled out one of her electric pistols.</p><p>“If Cass can dodge bullets,” Batgirl said, “then Shiva can dodge that.”</p><p>“Missy, I am fresh-the-hell outta ideas,” Jinny said.  “You got a better one, I’m takin’ up a collection.”</p><p>Batgirl was about to shrug when she heard Shiva’s voice above the howling wind.</p><p>“LADIES!” Shiva called out in the street above the shrieking wind.  “I HAVE ROBIN!”</p><p>After this pronouncement, a report like a shotgun going off sounded, and Robin’s agonized groans sounded.</p><p>“SHE CAN DIE QUICKLY AND LAST, OR SHE CAN DIE SLOWLY AND NOW!” Lady Shiva called.  “IT IS ENTIRELY UP TO YOU!”</p><p>Another savage punch sounded.  Another Robin howl, but softer this time.</p><p>“TICK-TOCK, GIRLS!”</p><p>Batgirl was nauseous.  She was terrified in places that she did not know she possessed.</p><p>But she stood up anyway.</p><p>Jinny looked up at her.  “You’re about to do somethin’ stupid, ain’tcha?”</p><p>“Yup.”</p><p>“Attagirl.”</p><p>“Pull your coat over your head.”</p><p>And Jinny did so.</p><p>Batgirl pressed the temple of her cowl.  A pair of lenses came down over her eyeslits, and the thermal vision came up.</p><p>The red, blobby heat-signature of Lady Shiva was half a block away.  Her right hand held a kneeling, half-conscious Robin firmly in place.</p><p>Batgirl had her target.</p><p>She procured three explosive Batarangs from her utility belt and flung them at the storefront window.  The glass and the mannequins exploded, letting in the frigid air and blinding snow.</p><p>And off she went.</p><p>She booked it through the snow.  She saw the thermal image of Lady Shiva turn her head toward her.  She picked up speed, before leaping, extending her right foot for a flying kick.</p><p>This was going to end badly.  Batgirl knew that.  This was Lady Shiva.  She wasn’t going to fall for this.</p><p>But if it afforded Robin the chance to get away, she’d be cool with that.</p><p>The milliseconds passed as though through rapidly hardening amber.  Lady Shiva’s whole torso moved toward Batgirl to intercept her.  And then…</p><p>And then…</p><p>The sun blinked out.  The wind ceased.  The snow stopped falling.</p><p>It confused Batgirl.</p><p>It also confused Lady Shiva.</p><p>
  <b>THWACK!</b>
</p><p>Batgirl’s boot caught Lady Shiva dead in the center of her face.  The kick from a sixteen-year-old girl knocked the world’s deadliest assassin back away from Robin, and onto her ass in the middle of Danny the Street.</p><p>Batgirl landed on her feet, arms up, fists clenched, pure action movie, grin on her face at having achieved something more difficult than using that same kick to part the Red Sea.</p><p>Then she looked out to see where she was.</p><p>The ten minutes for which she had asked Danny were up.  And Danny had teleported to…</p><hr/><p>
  <b>PITTSBURGH</b>
</p><p>They were surrounded on all sides by vast stands filled with yellow and black plastic seats.  And above the walls at the rear were huge banks of lights, shining down on them.  Beyond the gaps in the buildings that comprised Danny the Street, Batgirl could spy freshly manicured green grass.</p><p>Not only were they in Pittsburgh, but they were in the exact spot that Batgirl had requested of Danny.</p><p>PNC Park.  Home of the long-suffering Pittsburgh Pirates.  At the current moment, Danny the Street, complete with the Villa Sammartino, was situated right in the middle of the diamond itself.</p><p>Batgirl looked back down at Shiva.  She was getting back to her feet, wiping a trickle of blood from her lip with the back of her hand.  With that, she felt an onslaught of fear.</p><p>Two sets of hands grabbed Batgirl and pulled her away.  She looked back, and saw that they belonged to Black Canary and Barbara Gordon.  She looked over to see Jinny Hex and Bluebird attempt to bring Robin to her feet.  Robin, whose face was a bloody mess and whose green glasses she used in lieu of a domino mask were busted and crooked.</p><p>Batgirl looked back at Lady Shiva, who surveyed them all and grinned, before she stepped forward.</p><p>One step was all she took.  Something stopped her.  Her brows narrowed and her eyes scanned the area, as though she sensed something.</p><p>Abruptly, Lady Shiva looked to her right and fired off a wild punch at absolutely nothing.</p><p>Her fist made a loud <b>THWACK!</b> When it made contact with that nothing.</p><p>The nothing groaned.</p><p>The nothing collapsed onto the pavement, scattering some of the leftover powdery Nepalese snow.</p><p>And an electric shimmer appeared over the nothing, finally revealing it to be…</p><p><em>“Catwoman?” </em>Black Canary asked, incredulity making her voice a couple of registers a bit too high.</p><p>The unconscious Stephanie Brown, in her eggplant nanite Catsuit, was lying there in the middle of Danny the Street.  It was in that Catsuit, on her first night as Catwoman, that Stephanie had laid a thorough ass-kicking to the Arkham Knight with the numerous technological capabilities that the suit had to offer.</p><p>But Stephanie had to be conscious to use them.  A problem that Lady Shiva, and her freakish sense of awareness, had solved.</p><p>Robin and the Birds of Prey were all stunned to see this development.</p><p>Batgirl, however, was not.  After all, she had texted Steph ten minutes ago, telling her where they’d all be right at this very moment.</p><p>Hey, she knew she was in the neighborhood.</p><p>“If Steph’s here,” Bluebird said, “then that means…”</p><p>“Holy shit,” Barbara said.</p><p>
  <b>THOOM!</b>
</p><p>One of the banks of stadium lights went out.</p><p>
  <b>THOOM!</b>
</p><p>Then another.</p><p>
  <b>THOOM!  THOOM!  THOOM!</b>
</p><p>Until only one was left, bathing the eight women on Danny the Street in a single cone of light, the source of which emanated from beyond rightfield.</p><p>A silhouette emerged in the middle of the light.  A familiar sigil of straight lines and odd angles in the shape of…</p><p><em>“The Bat!” </em>Robin cried out.</p><p>The silhouette contracted in on itself, forming a black shape that descended, toward them from the heights of the right field stands until it landed in front of Robin and Batgirl, kicking up some more powdery snow.</p><p>It was Cassandra Wayne.</p><p>It was <em>Batman.</em></p><p>Batman stood up straight, resplendent in a black cape and gray body armor.  A slash of black lipstick across her lips and dark, angry eyes shining through the eyeslits of her cowl.</p><p>Lady Shiva smiled.  “Daughter.”</p><p>Batman said nothing.</p><p>“Your friends will live,” Shiva said. “But you and I?  We will have the battle for which we are fated.  To the death.”</p><p>Batman still said nothing.</p><p>“Nothing to say?” Lady Shiva asked.  “I’ve given you your power, and this is all I ask of you.  I brought you into this world.  <em>You owe me this!”</em></p><p>To which Batman tilted her head.</p><p>“No,” she said.  “No, I don’t.”</p><p>From the long shadow of the Villa Sammartino, a hand emerged from the darkness.  It was thick, and broad, with scarred knuckles.</p><p>And it firmly grasped Lady Shiva’s right shoulder.</p><p>Shiva turned and reactively swung her fist into the darkness…</p><p>...but the <em>sound </em>it made.</p><p>Batgirl couldn’t place it.  If she had to give it an approximation, it would have been like throwing a rock at a brick wall.  Neither one would have given.</p><p>Lady Shiva, holding her right hand and staring incomprehensibly into the shadows, stepped back.</p><p>And the new arrival stepped forward, into the light.</p><p>She was well over six feet, hulking and bald, with brown skin and deep black eyes.  She wore a long black skirt and a shirt bearing the logo of the Philadelphia Flyers.</p><p>And she stared down at Lady Shiva with a shark’s smile.</p><p>“Hi,” the new arrival said.  “I’m Hammerhead.  What’s your name?”</p><p>Lady Shiva punched Hammerhead in the face again.  Batgirl had heard softer pistol shots.  But not only did Hammerhead’s face not ripple, she didn’t even blink upon the moment of impact.</p><p>“Well that’s a funny fuckin’ name,” Hammerhead said.  “Mind spelling it for me?”</p><p>Shiva unloaded another right…</p><p>...only for Hammerhead to catch it firmly in the rugged expanse of her right palm.  Her fist closed around Shiva’s hand.</p><p>As Lady Shiva tried to pull her hand out of Hammerhead’s fist, Hammerhead looked her up and down.</p><p>“From the look of you,” Hammerhead said, “I’m guessing… <em>supervillain.”</em></p><p>And with that, Hammerhead squeezed her fist shut, destroying almost every bone in Lady Shiva’s right hand in the process.  Blood poured from the gaps between Hammerhead’s fingers, and even from this distance, Batgirl could see one of the bones on the back of Lady Shiva’s hand poking through the flesh like a bit of white styrofoam packing peanut, flecked in blood.</p><p>And Lady Shiva <em>howled. </em>  She sent thundering lefts into Hammerhead’s face.  Thundering lefts that were all too easy for Hammerhead to ignore.</p><p>“Now, are you one of those <em>scientist </em>supervillains?” Hammerhead asked, as she peered into the distance beyond.  “What, you got an army of fuckin’ killer robots back there?  Because that could be fun.”</p><p>Hammerhead turned her fist to the right.  And Batgirl could hear every bone in Lady Shiva’s wrist explode.</p><p>Those token lefts that Shiva was dishing out came to an abrupt end.  She was still screaming, though, opening and closing her left hand rapidly, confused as to what to do next.</p><p>“Wait,” Hammerhead said.  “Don’t tell me.  You’re one of those magic supervillains, ain’t you?  Like, you talk backwards and glitter shoots out your cooch?  That how this is gonna play out?”</p><p>Hammerhead brought her fist down and pulled up.  Which had the result of bending Lady Shiva’s right elbow ninety degrees… in the wrong direction.</p><p>Shiva didn’t have it in her to scream anymore.  Just a pitiful moan from a woman so used to dodging blows that pain from battle was a distant memory, only for it to come roaring back with interest after a decades-long absence.  Batgirl could see the tears in her eyes.  And could hear the only word on her lips.</p><p>“Please… Please…”</p><p>But Hammerhead only rolled her eyes.</p><p>“Don’t tell me you’re one of those kung-fu supervillains,” she said.</p><p>Hammerhead balled her left hand into a fist, and sent it careening into the side of Lady Shiva’s face.  Blood started pouring instantly.</p><p>
  <b>WHAM!</b>
</p><p>“You brought your weak-ass…”</p><p>
  <b>WHAM!</b>
</p><p>“...kung-fu bullshit…”</p><p>WHAM!</p><p>
  <em>“...into my house?”</em>
</p><p>
  <b>WHAM!</b>
</p><p>Lady Shiva finally dropped to her knees.  Hammerhead raised her fist yet again, and…</p><p>Batman called out.  “ENOUGH!”</p><p>Hammerhead looked at her.  “Fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck!”</p><p>Black Canary called out.  “ENOUGH!”</p><p>Hammerhead looked at her.  “Ehh, you’re lucky I’m a fan.”</p><p>And with that, Hammerhead let go.  Lady Shiva collapsed into a ball of broken humanity on the pavement.</p><p>A change came over Hammerhead.  She seemed to shrink a few inches.  Most of her muscle mass seemed to vanish.  And she grew a shoulder-length mop of black hair.</p><p>This new person who was Hammerhead until a second ago, looked around.  Finally, someone broke the silence.</p><p>“Crazy Jane?” Robin asked.</p><p>Jane looked at her.  “Who are you?”</p><p>“Robin,” she said, mopping some of the blood off her face.</p><p>“Robin’s a girl now?”</p><p>“Yes,” Batman said.  “She is.” </p><p>Jane stared at her, nonplussed. <em> “Batman’s a girl now?”</em></p><p>Crazy Jane huffed.  She pinched the bridge of her nose.</p><p>“Jesus,” she said.  “I’m gonna have to spend two whole days on Wikipedia trying to sort out what happened the last… fifteen…”</p><p>It was only now that Crazy Jane apparently became aware of her surroundings.  She looked around a bit before she said:</p><p>“Danny?”</p><p>Bright pink letters on the marquee of Peeping Tom’s Perpetual Cabaret:</p><p>
  <b>“jAnEy-KiNs!”</b>
</p><p>Jane smiled… but that smile withered as Lady Shiva finally rose to her feet.</p><p>A hush came over the ballpark as the most lethal woman on Earth surveyed them all.</p><p>It looked like her whole head was swollen.  The parts of her face that weren’t drenched in blood were bruised purple.  And she was carrying a useless sack of chunky meat that was a dangerous and fully functional right arm until about a minute ago.</p><p>But her eyes were pure hatred.  And Batgirl knew what it meant.</p><p>They had all seen Lady Shiva bested.</p><p>They had all seen Lady Shiva bleed.</p><p>They had all seen the tears in Lady Shiva’s eyes.</p><p>They had even heard Lady Shiva beg.</p><p>And for these transgressions, Lady Shiva would slaughter them all.  If it took a million years, Lady Shiva would watch them die.</p><p>Batgirl looked behind her to see how everyone else rescinded to this, and…</p><p>...wait, someone was missing.</p><p>Batgirl turned around.</p><p>While the floor show had played out, apparently Barbara Gordon had taken it upon herself to sneak back, and around.</p><p>And she was standing behind Shiva.</p><p>Barbara tapped her on the shoulder.</p><p>Lady Shiva turned…</p><p>
  <b>THWACK!</b>
</p><p>...and ate dirt, courtesy of a Barbara Gordon right.</p><p>They all looked down at the newly-unconscious Lady Shiva, no one saying a word.</p><p>But from her position, Batgirl could see Batman and Barbara Gordon lock eyes.</p><p>And for some bizarre reason, Barbara looked more scared of Cass than she ever had of Cass’ mother.</p><p>Or not.  Who knew?  Fuck it, Batgirl was tired.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Part Six (of Six)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XXI.</em>
    <em>
      <br/>
    </em>
    <em>And if I Ever Seem a Little Strange, Would You Excuse Me Please?</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>CLOVERTON, OHIO</b>
</p><p>In 1848, a lawyer named Gerard Caulder erected a mansion on the edge of the small town of Cloverton on the eastern edge of the state of Ohio.  Where civilization stopped being civilization, and started being Kentucky.</p><p>The mansion passed through the hands of heir after heir of the Caulder line until the death of the last Caulder, Niles.  Doctor Niles Caulder had been a brute force researcher into the human life span who had been responsible for the three accidents that gave Cliff Steele, Rita Farr, and Larry Trainor their superpowers.  Which meant, of course, that he was responsible for all three of their various infirmities.  When he died, he died unmourned.</p><p>Niles Caulder had been the head of the Doom Patrol, and so the mansion that he had inherited had become informally known as <em>“Doom Manor.”</em></p><p>On the spacious front lawn of Doom Manor on this chilly October evening, a street lined with storefronts, and with an Italian villa at its head, appeared instantaneously.  So sudden was its appearance, in fact, that every light on the southern end of Doom Manor turned on, like stars that only belatedly acted upon the suggestion to shine.</p><p>In the shadow of the Villa Sammartino on Danny the Street’s southern end, Crazy Jane stood and looked down at a few small dribbles of blood that had dried on the cement.</p><p>When she emerged from Masterpiece, the last thing she could have predicted to occur was <em>“Hammerhead whipping the everloving shit out of Batman’s mother.” </em>  Jane did not have it in her to reckon that, even in such an event, Batman herself <em>(“HERSELF?”) </em>and all her friends would assure her that such a thing would not only not be a faux-pas, but did in fact save at least half-a-dozen lives.</p><p>“You’re gonna keep the house, right Danny?” Jane asked.</p><p>Red letters across the marquee of Peeping Tom’s Perpetual Cabaret.  <b>“SuRe WiLL.”</b></p><p>“Good,” said Jane.  “There’s a, uh… y’know, a <em>valuable </em>painting down in the cellar.  I might want to see it again one day.”</p><p>Jane squinted down the street, to the stretch of green between Danny and the front door of Doom Manor.  A few figures were already outside.</p><p>And so, Jane began to walk.</p><p>“See ya around, Danny.”</p><p>Green letters. <b> “LuV yA bUnChEs!”</b></p><p>Telling any person, entity, or genderqueer teleporting street that she loved them was a little more emotional growth than Jane had planned for the evening.  So she just stuttered and said “That, uh, that’s great.”</p><p>Danny the Street vanished as soon as Jane stepped off the pavement at the end.  It left her alone, on the front lawn of a mansion she hadn’t seen in fifteen years, with a few silhouettes coming toward her.</p><p>The first two to come up to her were two women she’d never seen before, ergo, must have been new members of the Doom Patrol.  The moonlight provided at least a decent look at them.</p><p>The one on the right was an Asian girl who didn’t look a day over twenty-one.  She wore a black tank top shirt and sported a tragic and heart-stoppingly ugly blonde bowl cut.  Crazy Jane was the last person on Fake Jesus’ green Earth to criticize anyone for a lack of makeup, but the fact that this woman wore none only served to draw more attention to the absolute war crime occurring atop her head.</p><p>The woman on the left was… huh.  In the moonlight, it looked as though each arm, each leg, her head, and three separate segments of her torso was made up of a different kind of rock.  Her face was pure white, porous, grainy.  As though it were made of chalk.  Her eyes and her long hair were the same shade of purplish pink.</p><p>She looked like Metamorpho if Metamorpho was a girl.</p><p>“Hello,” said the rock woman on the left.  “Who might you be?”</p><p>“I could ask you the same thing,” said Jane.</p><p>“That’s not how this works,” said the rock woman.</p><p>“Aw, come off it,” said the Asian woman with the blond bowl cut. Rounding out the unseemly aura of the woman was a thick, almost <em>violently </em>country accent.  “Ya know who in the hell this woman is.”</p><p>“No,” said the rock woman, “I can’t say that I do.”</p><p>“This here’s Crazy Jane!  Ain’t you read the wikipedia article on the team we’re in?”</p><p>“No,” the rock woman said.  “It can’t be Crazy Jane.”</p><p>“Cliff went to Nightwing’s because her communicator went off after fifteen years.”</p><p>“Still doesn’t change the fact that it can’t be.”</p><p>“I am Jane, though,” Jane said.  “So it very much can be.”</p><p>To which the rock woman looked at her and said “No, you’re not.”</p><p>Jane was left with little recourse but to blink.  “I, uh… What?”</p><p>“First,” said the rock woman, “you haven’t aged a day since your last known photograph.  And second…”</p><p>“Jane?”</p><p>All three of them turned.</p><p>A blonde woman had joined the impromptu summit on the Doom Manor grounds.  She was wearing a long black coat that obscured what she wore underneath.  Her hair was back in a ponytail, and though the evening obscured them, Jane could bet money that there were lines on her pleasing, angular face.  After all, she had to have aged fifteen years since last they spoke.</p><p>It was Kate Godwin.</p><p>It was Coagula.</p><p>And her arms wrapped around Jane, who did not hug back.</p><p>“Jesus,” Coagula said.  “It’s been so long!”</p><p>“Yeah,” said Jane.  “It has.”</p><p>“You haven’t aged a day!”</p><p>“Neither have you,” said Jane.  “What do they put in those hormones you take?”</p><p>“See?” asked the rock woman.  “She hasn’t aged a day.  Which…”</p><p>Coagula broke off the hug, and glared at the rock woman.  “Emily, it’s actually her.”</p><p>“...which would give someone pause.”</p><p>Coagula weakly indicated the two women.  “Fever and Element Woman.”</p><p>“I’m Shyleen,” said the Asian woman with the blonde bowl cut, “and this here’s Emily.”</p><p>Emily the Element Woman just weakly waved.</p><p>“You need to say Hi to Larry,” said Coagula to Jane.</p><p>“Someone say my name?” a man’s voice asked.</p><p>A tall drink of water walked up to them holding a coffee cup.  A long brown coat over black cargo pants and a burgundy turtleneck.  Every bit of skin that might be exposed by this clothing was covered in long strips of cloth bandages, up to and including the head, over the eyes of which were a pair of cat’s eye sunglasses.</p><p>It was Larry <em>“Negative Man” </em>Trainor.  Former test pilot and current superhero.</p><p>“Larry!” Coagula said.  “Look who’s here!”</p><p>“Hey, Jane,” Negative Man said… and it was all he said.</p><p>“That all you got to say after fifteen years?” asked Shyleen.</p><p>Negative Man just sighed.  “You’re gonna have to forgive them, Jane.  They’re new.  You popping up isn’t even the third weirdest thing I’ve seen today.  How you been?”</p><p>“Fine,” Jane said.  “Got a tan.  You?”</p><p>“I’ve been doing alright.”</p><p>“That tea you’re drinking?” Jane asked. Looking at the coffee cup.</p><p>“Why, yes it is.”</p><p>“There booze in it?”</p><p>“Could be.”</p><p>“Can I have some?”</p><p>“If you know where the tea is,” Negative Man said, “and you know where the bourbon is, then I don’t see why not.”  And with that, he raised his cup to her, and walked back toward Doom Manor.</p><p>“Y’know,” Coagula said, “someone’s gonna have to tell me how he drinks that shit without taking his bandages off.”</p><p>But Jane didn’t say anything to that.</p><p>She had her eyes on Cliff.</p><p>Apparently Robotman, who was making his way down the lawn toward them, had not had an upgrade to his metal body in the fifteen years that Jane and the rest of the One-Hundred-Nine were in Masterpiece.  The silhouette was all too familiar.</p><p>He finally made his way up to them.</p><p>“Hey,” he said.</p><p>And “Hey,” she said right back.  </p><p>Coagula knew the two well enough to break the embrace from Jane and walk back to Doom Manor.  And Shyleen and Emily followed suit, leaving Jane and Cliff to wordlessly stare at each other in the moonlight.</p><p>Crazy Jane missed the component parts as a person to to talk about her problems in any way that could be deemed as healthy or productive.  And Cliff was the kind of old school man who thought talking without a purpose or plan was simply wasteful.  Though they’d had the occasional deep and meaningful conversation, most of the time Cliff and Jane were simply content to coexist on the same wavelength in comfortable silence.</p><p>This by itself made Cliff the best friend Crazy Jane ever had.</p><p>They lost fifteen years, but she aged far slower than the average person and he did not age at all.  If someone told Jane that, in the far future, she and cliff would be the only two people left on the burned out crust of planet Earth, she would believe it.</p><p>But in the end, Jane reckoned she had to say something.  So she said the thing that was on her mind.</p><p>“Batman’s a girl now,” she said.  “So, uh… <em>That’s </em>a thing.”</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XXII.<br/></em>
    <em>Analogue Listening Devices</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>THE </b>
  <b><em>AERIE THREE,</em> </b>
  <b>OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN</b>
</p><p>In the brig of the <em>Aerie Three, </em>the spacious stealth plane belonging to the Birds of Prey, Aaliyah Ramsay stood, with her armor on sans cowl and cape, and stared open-mouthed and tired, at the heavily sedated Lady Shiva.</p><p>Her face was swollen and misshapen, even though the blood that Hammerhead and drawn had been wiped away.  The right sleeve of Shiva’s long coat had been cut away, and her mangled right arm was a forest of tubes and bandaging.</p><p>Aaliyah heard footsteps on the metal floor next to her.  She looked up.</p><p>Stephanie Brown, a bruise dimly blooming on her jaw, was holding two glasses containing amber liquid.  The less full of which she passed to Aaliyah.</p><p>“What’s this?” Aaliyah asked.</p><p>“Early Times.”</p><p>“Which is?”</p><p>“Whiskey.”</p><p>“Why are you giving me whiskey?”</p><p>Stephanie sighed.  “Fifteen years ago, the day after Game Seven--</p><p>“You mean Spoiler Day?”</p><p>“Can we not call it that?” Stephanie asked.  “Fifteen years ago, on… <em>that day </em>… Cassandra Cain was given her first drink of whiskey by Selina Wayne, while they both waited for me to come home.”</p><p>“But you apparently didn’t come home for another fourteen years.”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Because in the smarts department…”</p><p>“The point I’m trying to make,” Stephanie said, rolling her eyes, “is that the tradition of booze goes from Catwoman to Batgirl.  My favorite person of all time was the one who was Batgirl before you were.  So here.”</p><p>Stephanie held that glass out to Aaliyah again.</p><p>“There have been more people connected to the Speed Force in the past five years than non-powered superheroes have landed hits on Lady Shiva in the past thirty,” Stephanie said.  “And you are by far the youngest.  That calls for a drink.”</p><p>Aaliyah took the glass.  The amber liquid barely filled the bottom of the glass.  She knocked it back and…</p><p>...and immediately started coughing.  It went down her virgin throat like a knife lost in the middle of a sugary sweet fog.  The coughing somehow made it worse.  The parts of her lungs that usually only got air during exercise got a full snoot of the viscous whiskey fumes.</p><p>As she tried to blink tears out of her eyes, she handed the glass back to Stephanie, who took it.  Aaliyah slowly got herself back under control.</p><p>At least she could say she had whiskey before Carrie Kelley did.</p><p>“Where’s she going?” Aaliyah asked, pointing at the sedated Lady Shiva.</p><p>“Iron Heights,” said Stephanie.</p><p>“Isn’t that where The Flash’s villains go?”</p><p>“Good catch.  Yes it is.”</p><p>“Then why is she going there?” Aaliyah asked.</p><p>“Because they also have the best medical wing in the whole of the United States prison system,” said Stephanie in reply.  “And someone’s gonna need to look at that arm of hers.  It’s… It’s bad.  Worst case scenario, she gets it amputated.”</p><p>“Don’t you mean best case scenario?”</p><p>Steph looked at her.  “Doesn’t take a lot to get you shitfaced and saying stupid shit, does it?”</p><p>“I’m just saying,” Aaliyah said, “Lady Shiva with one arm is a less dangerous Lady Shiva.”</p><p>“Lady Shiva with a bionic arm bought and paid for by Nasty Luthor or Veronica Cale is a <em>more </em>dangerous Lady Shiva,” said Stephanie.  “The no-kill rule isn’t just about keeping people alive.  There are a ton of levels and gradations.”</p><p>“So how long are the sedatives going to keep her out for?” Aaliyah asked.</p><p>“That depends,” said Stephanie.  “When are the next Olympics?”</p><p>“Winter, or Summer?”</p><p>Stephanie held a hand out, indicating the stairs up further into the guts of the <em>Aerie Three. </em> Aaliyah went.</p><p>After Hammerhead dropped Lady Shiva, Danny the Street teleported everyone back to Pizzoferrato to rendezvous with Lady Blackhawk and the <em>Aerie Three. </em>  Minus Babs and Cass, who stayed behind in Pittsburgh to do… whatever.</p><p>As soon as the plane touched down, Danny the Street teleported away with Crazy Jane back to Doom Manor in Ohio.  Before they all got on the plane, Aaliyah saw Carrie spying the scenery with a dopey smile and a glint in the eye that Lady Shiva didn’t swell shut, telling Aaliyah that she was already on some painkillers.</p><p><em>“Dude,” </em>Carrie had said to Aaliyah, wildly using her hands to indicate the hill upon which the Villa Sammartino had, until tonight, stood. <em> “‘S fuckin’ </em>Italy!”</p><p>Aaliyah and Carrie were left to situate themselves inside the <em>Aerie Three </em>while Lady Blackhawk was left with the unenviable task of asking Black Canary, Bluebird, and Jinny Hex to strip naked in the cargo bay and submit to a high-pressure hose bath to get all that mysterious black paint off.</p><p>In a small room to the east of the cargo bay was the place where Oracle kept some computer equipment to do logistics for missions.  Barbara Gordon bought the plane, and Barbara forbade anyone ever setting foot in this room.</p><p>So naturally, everyone was there in her absence.  Carrie, not wearing her cape or busted glasses, was sitting in the computer chair.  Harper and Jinny, in matching gray sweatpants and sweatshirts, were sitting on the bed, Jinny curled up with her head in Harper’s lap, who was sitting up straight.  Dinah, also in gray sweats, was holding up the metal wall between them.  Zinda “Lady Blackhawk” Blake was standing next to her.</p><p>The <em>Aerie Three </em>was apparently on autopilot.</p><p>Aaliyah and Stephanie took up the left and right of the door, respectively.</p><p>“You were supposed to watch my kid,” said Harper to Carrie.  She had bandages over her broken nose.</p><p>“Hey,” said Jinny from Harper's lap, her fingers bandaged, her damp hair stringy, and high as a kite from the painkillers.  “Lay off, hon.”</p><p>“I’m not gonna--”</p><p>“We was young once, too.”</p><p>“I’m not gonna come down on her,” said Harper.</p><p>“Good,” said Dinah with a scratchy voice.</p><p>Harper just looked at her.</p><p>“I’m just saying,” said Dinah, “if Robin and Batgirl didn’t have their bright idea, we’d all be dead.”</p><p>Harper blinked.  “You don’t have to say it like that.”</p><p>“It’s true, though.”</p><p>“Yeah, but you don’t have to say it like that.”</p><p>“How come she can’t say it like that?” asked Zinda.</p><p>“Because,” Harper said, before she stopped. Aaliyah could see that she was trying to collect her thoughts.  She could also see that Harper was about to rub her face, but remembered at the last second that her nose was busted before she stopped.</p><p>“Because,” Harper said, “I don’t want Carrie and Aaliyah doing cool cape shit in front of Mattie-Ann, giving her ideas.”</p><p>Harper looked among all the women in attendance, but apparently saw that they all needed elaboration.</p><p>“Okay,” said Harper.  “I’m not the religious type.  Or the praying type.  Or even the Believing-in-God type.  But if <em>any </em>of the above kept Mattie-Ann out of a mask and cape for the rest of her life, then I would be <em>all </em>of the above.”</p><p>Harper seemed to suppress a shudder.  “I can’t <em>tell </em>you how terrifying Halloween is.”</p><p>“Halloween is <em>supposed </em>to be terrifying,” said Stephanie.</p><p>“I can’t <em>tell </em>you how terrifying Halloween is,” Harper said again, ignoring her.  “Taking Mattie-Ann to the costume shop, hoping against hope that she doesn’t pick the Wonder Woman costume.  I do not want Mattie-Ann as a superhero.  Ever.”</p><p>“This bothers you, don’t it?” Jinny asked from Harper’s lap.</p><p>“It does,” said Harper.  “It really does.  I remember that speech Roy Harper gave at Dick Grayson’s fake wake last year about how his daughter made it to college without ever once putting on a cape or tights, and I was like <em>‘That’s the dream.’ </em>  And thank the Source Wall that right now, Mattie-Ann does not want to be like her mom when she grows up.”</p><p>“The superhero part, or the politician part?” asked Zinda.</p><p>“Neither,” said Harper.  “Thank Christ.”</p><p>“What <em>does </em>Mattie-Ann want to be when she grows up?” asked Dinah.</p><p>“An eighteenth century barmaid.”</p><p>Only Carrie laughed at this.  But Carrie was high out of her gourd right now, so…</p><p>“Were I not a teenage superhero,” said Harper, “my knees would be in much better shape.”</p><p>“Were you not a teenage superhero,” said Dinah, “there wouldn’t be a Mattie-Ann at all.”</p><p>“Yeah,” said Stephanie.  “You and Tim were Bluebird and Robin before you were man and wife.”  </p><p>Harper looked at all of them, and said “I didn’t come here for logic, you dirty pieces of shit!”</p><p>All of them fell on the range of smiling and laughing… all except Carrie, who seemed upset by something.</p><p>“What is it?” Dinah asked.</p><p>“I have a boyfriend I haven’t gotten to far with because I didn’t want him to see all the welts I have below the neckline.  She pointed at the swollen eye that Lady Shiva gave her, and asked “How’m I gonna explain this?”</p><p>Everyone in the room looked at each other, before trying to find somewhere else to look.  It dawned on Aaliyah that no one in the room, including herself, could relate.</p><p>She tried to find a way to change the subject… and was successful.</p><p>“There’s something that’s been bugging me,” said Aaliyah.  And everyone in the small room looked at her.</p><p>“Your vital sign uplink to this plane went out when you went into that painting,” said Aaliyah.  “That’s why the S.O.S was sent.  The one we responded to.”</p><p>“Yeah,” said Jinny.  “What about it?”</p><p>“But Robotman only went to Nightwing when Crazy Jane’s Doom Patrol communicator went off.  <em>Inside </em>the painting.”</p><p>“Uh-huh,” said Dinah.</p><p>“So… why did one go off, and not the other?”</p><p>Zinda snorted.  “Shitfire,” she said.  “That’s easy.”</p><p>“It is?” asked Aaliyah.</p><p>“Sure,” said Zinda.  “Y’see, how it works is…”</p><hr/><p>
  <span class="u">
    <em>XXIII.<br/></em>
    <em>The Gotham City Society of Fireproof Women</em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>PITTSBURGH</b>
</p><p>There had been some commingling among those assembled on the diamond of PNC Park after the apprehension of Lady Shiva.  The tending of wounds and the exchanging of pleasantries.</p><p>Batman picked up Catwoman as she eased her way back into consciousness. While everyone was getting their gameplans straight, Barbara spied the two exchanging a kiss roughly where the pitcher’s mound would have been.  Given Cassandra Wayne’s infuriating and stymying love for the game of baseball, Barbara figured this must have been a dream come true for her.</p><p>Indeed, this love of baseball went a long way toward the altogether genial interactions that Cassandra had had with Barbara’s father, the former police commissioner and mayor James Gordon.  These interactions included one screaming match about trade deadlines, whatever the hell those were.  Barbara Gordon knew so much already, did she have to know how baseball worked, too?</p><p>While the party congregated, Barbara stood on the outside, watching.  The look that Batman had given her knocked her back to her teenage years.  Back to when she was Batgirl, and she had run afoul of the infuriating, righteous, and hard-to-get-along-with Bruce Wayne.  That initial spark of dread, before she collected her mammoth and unending reservoirs of piss-soaked indignation and vinegar-scented grievance, and tried to give back as good as she got.</p><p>But still… Cass was Batman, alright.</p><p>Barbara looked up to see Dinah coming toward her.  Wordlessly, she wrapped up Barbara in a hug, her mouth right next to her ear.</p><p>“It’s gonna be okay,” Dinah said softly.</p><p>That icy Batman look flitted across Barbara’s mind again.</p><p>“I don’t think it will,” said Barbara.</p><p>“You’re confusing <em>‘okay’ </em>with <em>‘easy,’” </em>said Dinah.  “You silly bitch.”</p><p>Dinah Lance-Choi had spent an unhealthy chunk of her life dating Oliver Queen, before she tapped out and got out.  So maybe she was on to something.</p><p>They broke the embrace, but Dinah still kept a hand around Barbara’s wrist as they separated, resulting in a shower of dry black paint chips.  She found a spare bit of flesh on Dinah’s cheek that had no paint, and planted a small kiss there.  Only then, did Dinah let go, and walk to the center of Danny the Street with everyone else.</p><p>And in a blink, they were gone, teleported back to Italy, before Danny took Jane back to Doom Manor.  And Barbara Gordon was left alone, standing on the infield of a baseball park, whose team everyone had assured her was terrible.</p><p>Seconds passed in the darkness, until Barbara heard the scuffing of boots on smooth concrete.  Barbara turned, and saw Cass standing on the steps of the visiting dugout.  Black slacks and boots and a Pirates jersey beneath a black leather jacket.  She had a towel over her right shoulder.  Her Batman suit must have been in the duffle bag, whose strap she held in her left hand.  She had taken the congregation on the field as an excuse to change her clothes.</p><p>All Cassandra said was:</p><p>“Follow me.”</p><p>So Barbara did.  Back through the dugout, through a long tunnel, and through a set of steel double doors at the end, until they found themselves in the PNC Park parking lot.</p><p>A couple of rows down, bathed in the yellow sodium glow of the light pole, was a late model silver coup.  Some cars just screamed <em>“rental,” </em>as no one would select them of their own accord.</p><p>Cass unlocked the doors with the little gadget on the keychain she fished from her leather jacket.  She said “Wait,” so Barbara did as she was bade.</p><p>Cassandra opened the rear driver door, and shoved her duffel bag into the backseat before slamming the door.  Then she opened the driver’s side door and leaned in, doing… something… before she came back out again, closing the door behind her.  She came around the car, and tossed the keys to Barbara, who caught them reflexively.</p><p>“Drive,” Cassandra said.</p><p>There was a white towel on the driver’s seat.  Of course.  Returning a rental with black paint on the upholstery simply would not do.</p><p>As soon as Cass got in the passenger side, and they both put on their seatbelts, Barbara turned the car over.  She noticed that Cass’ phone was in a little port beneath the console.</p><p>“My phone will tell you where to go,” said Cass.</p><p>And so it did.  As soon as they left PNC Park’s lot, a little digital voice began telling her which turns to take and where to go straight.  Onto the highway.  Up to the offramp.  Into the dingy canyon of the Great Pittsburgh Interior.</p><p>Until the phone finally told her to stop the car at a Citgo station on Custer Avenue.  A squat little construction, unevenly sandwiched on both sides by tall buildings getting their post-foreclosure crumble on.</p><p>Barbara killed the engine.  Cass took her seatbelt off.</p><p>“There’s an alley over there on the left,” Cass said.  “Wait for me.”</p><p>And then she got out.</p><p>The alley was on the tight side of the uneven Citgo Station Sandwich.  But she did as she was told.  Burning slightly that she was told to do anything, at all, by anyone.</p><p>A minute passed in the chilly Pittsburgh evening, until Cassandra Wayne returned…</p><p>...holding a forty ounce bottle of booze in a brown paper bag, hobo style.</p><p>Cass unscrewed the cap, took a swig, and handed it to Barbara, who took it.  She opened up the mouth of the bag to get a look at the bottle.</p><p>Olde English 800.</p><p>“Christ,” said Barbara.</p><p>She still took her own swig, though.  Letting the weak, hoppy iciness cascade down her throat.  Good <em>God, </em>it was awful.</p><p>“Well?” Cassandra asked.</p><p>“Well what?” Barbara asked.</p><p>“You have a grievance,” said Cass as she took the bottle.</p><p>“Me?” Barbara asked.  “A grievance?”</p><p>And Cassandra just glared at her.</p><p>In the moment, Barbara didn’t know why she said it.  And given ample time for introspection, she still wouldn’t have been able to figure it out.</p><p>“Why this?” Barbara said, edging herself in before Cass could say anything.  “We could be having dinner like civilized people, and we’re in an alley drinking hobo juice.”</p><p>“No,” Cassandra said after she took her swig.  “There’s… There’s not gonna be any separation between the two of us.  No table and no ego.  Know what I think?”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“That twenty years ago, Harley Quinn killed The Joker.  And then set off a chain reaction.  The Undying.  You getting the use of your legs back.  Bruce and Selina getting married.  You meeting me.  Harmonia and Nemesis.  The Battle of Founders Island.  Jason coming back.  Me and Conner.  Game Seven.  Kate going off with Diana to join the Lesbian Navy.  Me becoming Black Bat when Bruce retired.  Ra’s al Ghul and the Arkham Knight.  Steph finally coming back.  Me becoming confident enough to call myself Batman.”</p><p>Cassandra took a deep breath.  “Any of that happens in even, like, a slightly different way, and we’re not here now.  Don’t ask me why we’re here.  Ask yourself how this could have played out any other way.”</p><p>She handed the bottle out.  “Now shut up, drink your hobo juice, and say the things you’ve been wanting to say for a year.”</p><p>Barbara scowled, took the bottle, and guzzled a bit.</p><p>“What you did hurt,” said Babs.</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>“A lot.”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>“I don’t like being the one who doesn’t know what’s going on,” Barbara said.  “You had this plot to take down Ra’s al Ghul.  You let Duke in on it, you let Conner in, you let Dick in…”</p><p>“After the fact.”</p><p>“After the fact, but still,” Barbara said.  “Why not me?”</p><p>“If you have a plan that relies on secrecy,” Cassandra said, “why would you let the secret out to people who didn’t need to know?”</p><p>“It’s not that,” Barbara said.  “I mean, it’s not just that.  I can handle not feeling trusted.  I can’t handle…”</p><p>And it was there she stopped.  A roadblock went up between her brain and her mouth.</p><p>“What?” Cassandra asked.</p><p>Brick by brick, the roadblock came down, and Barbara said:</p><p>“I can’t handle feeling stupid.”</p><p>And it just kinda hung there between the two of them.</p><p>“I took you in,” Barbara said.  “I taught you everything you know.  And this was coming off a few years when I was in a wheelchair, and my brains were all I had.  I <em>had </em>to be the smartest person in the room.  If you can pull something like that, and I couldn’t see it, then… I don’t know.”</p><p>Barbara, looking down at the cracked pavement of the alley, handed the bottle back to Cass.</p><p>“I’m willing to bet,” Cass said after a pause, “if you were put to the question of what kind of daughter you wanted before you ever met me, you’d have said you wanted a daughter who was strong and independent.”</p><p>“Yeah?” Barbara asked, wondering where she was going with this.</p><p>“A strong, independent woman, wanting a strong, independent daughter.”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“And it usually comes way too late for strong, independent women to realize what having a strong, independent daughter means.  You got what you wanted, Babs, but strength and independence only rub up against each other.  That’s how it works.  I was only ever gonna piss you off through what you set in motion.  But it’s what comes <em>after </em>that matters.”</p><p>The Olde English must have been strong.  Barbara could not grapple with this.</p><p>“I come up with a plan like that,” Cass said, “who do you think I was trying to impress?  Bruce?  He gave me a talking-to the day after, telling me not to play with peoples’ lives and emotions like that, because he got burned too many times in his Batman years being a complete asshole doing what I did.  But at least I knew the risks, and I knew deep down that when the hurt feelings and shit were over, you were gonna be proud of me.  Because I learned enough from you to know that that was the kind of shit <em>you’d </em>have pulled in your Batgirl days.  And you know it’s true.”</p><p>Cass huffed.  “And the day never came,” she said, before she took her swig, and handed the bottle back to Barbara.</p><p>“And now it’s my turn,” Cassandra said.</p><p>“Your turn?”</p><p>Cass nodded, and said “You didn’t have faith in me.”</p><p>Barbara opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out.  The memory came back to her in Dolby and 8K.  Of her telling Bruce in the Batcave <em>“She can’t do it.  She can’t be The Bat in Gotham.”</em></p><p>This had come after Dick Grayson and Conner Kent had died.  Of course, the latter wasn’t true, and the former condition didn’t stick.  All cogs in the machine of Cassandra Wayne’s great plan.</p><p>“The only reason you were in that sewer,” Cassandra said, “the only reason Ra’s al Ghul almost killed you, was because you didn’t think I could do the job.  If you held tight for another day, you’d have gone through a lot less pain.”</p><p>Barbara could only avert her eyes.  That old embarrassment she felt having found out about all this after the fact, coming in and putting its feet up on the couch.  But she was able to take her swig and hand the bottle back.</p><p>“I read Bruce’s files from his old Batman days,” Cassandra said.  “And I read all your old logs from those same missions in the Clock Tower.  You and Bruce had screaming matches.  But reading all that, do you know what I thought?”</p><p>“What?” Barbara asked, scared of what, precisely, Cassandra thought.</p><p>“That it was ironic that the one of us that had the most friction with Bruce was the one of us that was the most like him.”</p><p>And that was when the fire alarm started sounding in Barbara Gordon’s subconscious.  She wanted to do… something.  She wanted to spit on the pavement.  Take that bottle of hobo juice and shatter it against the wall.  Some grand act of aggression.  There was still enough Batgirl in her not to take that lying down.</p><p>“Dick told me he told you the same thing when you were in recovery.”</p><p>“He did,” Barbara said with an edge in her voice.</p><p>“And you didn’t handle it well.”</p><p>“I didn’t.”</p><p>“Because?”</p><p>“Because…”</p><p>And though she didn’t finish the thought verbally, the thought broadcast itself in every dark crevasse and dusty hall of her interior.</p><p>
  <em>Because the people who love you aren’t supposed to tell you the things you already know.</em>
</p><p>Just like that, it was over.  Barbara Gordon had spent half her life in costume, and no fight in which she had engaged had been this exhausting.</p><p>And no defeat had been this total.</p><p>“You have to respect the fact,” Cass said, “that the people who love you have to tiptoe around your ego.  Now believe it or not, that’s okay.  Different people require different levels of finesse.  That’s just how people are.  But if you don’t reckon with this now, you are going to have problems later.  Bruce figured this out in the nick of time.  But now we’re all just waiting on you.”</p><p>“If it’s so hard,” Barbara said in a weak voice, “then why do you do it?”</p><p>“Because you’re worth it,” Cassandra said.  “You… <em>impossible </em>thing.”</p><p>Cassandra took a swig.  A long one that made her eyes water.</p><p>“I’m in a position where I have nice things to say about myself.  I can see why others want me around.  I wouldn’t have gotten here without you.  You piss me off, Babs.  You piss me off, and I <em>miss </em>you, and I <em>love </em>you in… in ways they don’t have words for.  So… I suggest you let that one marinate.”</p><p>She held out the bottle, Barbara took it, but she didn’t drink.  She just let the wind flow into her ears.  She looked in the volatile quicksand of her newfound humility and found a diamond that she deemed useful.</p><p>“I’m sorry I didn’t have faith in you,” she said, the words coming out in a croak.</p><p>“I’m sorry I made you feel stupid,” Cassandra said in an altogether more confident tone, which, y’know, good for her.</p><p>It was only after a year of recriminations both private and public that Barbara Gordon was able to ask herself <em>“There, was that so hard?”</em></p><p>A couple of minutes passed that were as increasing in their warmth as they were silent.</p><p>Until Cassandra finally said “I want to see my little brother.”</p><p>“Done.”</p><p>“Steph’s gonna spoil him rotten,” Cassandra said.  “Just a heads up.”</p><p>Barbara smiled.  “He’s five months old.”</p><p>“And Simon Baz is the dad,” Cass said in a way that was not a question.</p><p>“Yup.”</p><p>
  <em>“Nice.”</em>
</p><p>And Barbara laughed.</p><p>A couple of more minutes passed, with more silence, though this was an altogether comfortable one.  In the movies, they’d hug.  In the movies, however, one party was not drenched in black paint.</p><p>“Well,” Cassandra said, “I still have a hotel room in the city.  A hot shower and room service is all yours.  Just say the word.”</p><p>Barbara looked at Cass.  The one in whom her hopes and dreams rested.  The product of all her work.  Her life’s story.  Only five years separated them, but in a just world, Cassandra Wayne would outlive her.</p><p>But justice was both their business, so things were looking up on that front.</p><p>Barbara took a swig of booze before she elected to speak.</p><p>“It’s a nice night,” she said.  “I suppose we could wait a bit longer, don’t you?”</p><hr/><p>
  <em>“Demonstrate for me possibilities I’ve never thought of and present me with heroes who will give me courage and hope.  Ease my sorrows and increase my joy.  Teach me compassion.  Entertain and enchant and enlighten me.  Tell me a story.” </em>
  <b>- Dennis O’Neil (1939 - 2020)</b>
</p><hr/><p>
  <b>The first chapter of </b>
  <b><em>The Undying,</em> </b>
  <b>posted Monday, October 29, 2018</b>
</p><p>
  <b>-</b>
</p><p>
  <b>The final part of </b>
  <b><em>When I Paint My Masterpiece,</em> </b>
  <b>posted Monday, November 2, 2020</b>
</p><hr/><p>
  <b>THE END</b>
</p>
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